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159-537: Infinite Jest is a 1996 novel by American writer David Foster Wallace . Categorized as an encyclopedic novel , Infinite Jest is featured in Time magazine's list of the 100 best English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005. The novel has an unconventional narrative structure and includes hundreds of extensive endnotes , some with footnotes of their own. A literary fiction bestseller after having sold 44,000 hardcover copies in its first year of publication,

318-416: A metaphysical activity. Infinite Jest draws explicitly or allusively on many previous works of literature. As its title implies, the novel is in part based on the play Hamlet . Enfield Tennis Academy corresponds to Denmark , ruled by James ( King Hamlet ) and Avril ( Queen Gertrude ). When James dies, he is replaced by Charles ( Claudius ), the uncle of Avril's gifted son Hal ( Prince Hamlet ). As in

477-733: A "Professor of the Year" award in 1996. From fourth grade, Wallace lived with his family in Urbana , where he attended Yankee Ridge Elementary School, Brookens Junior High School and Urbana High School . As an adolescent, Wallace was a regionally ranked junior tennis player. He wrote about this period in the essay "Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley", originally published in Harper's Magazine as "Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes". Although his parents were atheists , Wallace twice attempted to join

636-461: A "white noise" of television, product brand names, and clichés. The cyberpunk fiction of William Gibson , Neal Stephenson , and many others use science fiction techniques to address this postmodern, hyperreal information bombardment. Perhaps demonstrated most famously and effectively in Heller's Catch-22 , the sense of paranoia , the belief that there's an ordering system behind the chaos of

795-438: A 1997 interview on Charlie Rose , Wallace said that the notes were to disrupt the linear narrative, to reflect his perception of reality without jumbling the narrative structure, and that he could have jumbled the sentences "but then no one would read it". D. T. Max has described Wallace's work as an "unusual mixture of the cerebral and the hot-blooded", often featuring multiple protagonists and spanning different locations in

954-398: A 2008 retrospective, The New York Times called the book "a masterpiece that's also a monster—nearly 1,100 pages of mind-blowing inventiveness and disarming sweetness. Its size and complexity make it forbidding and esoteric." Time magazine included the novel in its list of the 100 best English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005. As Wallace's magnum opus , Infinite Jest

1113-567: A 24-hour avant-garde open-air theatre adaptation in 2012. Infinite Jest was adapted in Finnish for radio and broadcast in six episodes by Yle in January 2023. Infinite Jest has been translated: David Foster Wallace David Foster Wallace (February 21, 1962 – September 12, 2008) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and university professor of English and creative writing . Wallace's 1996 novel Infinite Jest

1272-483: A Justified Sinner (1824), Thomas Carlyle 's Sartor Resartus (1833–1834), and Jack Kerouac 's On the Road (1957), but postmodern literature was particularly prominent in the 1960s and 1970s. In the 21st century, American literature still features a strong current of postmodern writing, like the postironic Dave Eggers ' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), and Jennifer Egan 's A Visit from

1431-544: A bit more with David Foster Wallace." Infinite Jest is one of the recommendations in Kakutani's book Ex Libris: 100 Books to Read and Reread . Playwright Ken Campbell worked on an adaptation of Infinite Jest for the Millennium. His concept was to have 1,000 performers who each paid $ 23 to take part in the event, which would last a week. It did not come to fruition. German theatrical company Hebbel am Ufer produced

1590-523: A break from the 19th century realism . In character development, both modern and postmodern literature explore subjectivism , turning from external reality to examine inner states of consciousness, in many cases drawing on modernist examples in the " stream of consciousness " styles of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf , or explorative poems like The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot . In addition, both modern and postmodern literature explore fragmentariness in narrative- and character-construction. The Waste Land

1749-743: A center piece of the Latin American "boom" , a movement coterminous with postmodernism. Some of the major figures of the "Boom" and practitioners of Magic Realism (Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar etc.) are sometimes listed as postmodernists. This labeling, however, is not without its problems. In Spanish-speaking Latin America, modernismo and posmodernismo refer to early 20th-century literary movements that have no direct relationship to modernism and postmodernism in English. Finding it anachronistic, Octavio Paz has argued that postmodernism

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1908-412: A certain dream-like quality. Some of the characteristic features of this kind of fiction are the mingling and juxtaposition of the realistic and the fantastic or bizarre, skillful time shifts, convoluted and even labyrinthine narratives and plots, miscellaneous use of dreams, myths and fairy stories, expressionistic and even surrealistic description, arcane erudition, the element of surprise or abrupt shock,

2067-645: A collection of symbols and myth. The episcopate of this pop-reference movement were the post-Nabokovian Black Humorists , the Metafictionists and assorted franc-and latinophiles only later comprised by "postmodern". The erudite, sardonic fictions of the Black Humorists introduced a generation of new fiction writers who saw themselves as sort of avant-avant-garde, not only cosmopolitan and polyglot but also technologically literate, products of more than just one region, heritage, and theory, and citizens of

2226-484: A combination of multiple genres to create a unique narrative or to comment on situations in postmodernity : for example, William S. Burroughs uses science fiction, detective fiction, westerns; Margaret Atwood uses science fiction and fairy tales; Umberto Eco uses detective fiction, fairy tales, and science fiction, and so on. Though pastiche commonly involves the mixing of genres, many other elements are also included (metafiction and temporal distortion are common in

2385-564: A culture that said its most important stuff about itself via mass media. In this regard one thinks particularly of the Gaddis of The Recognitions and JR , the Barth of The End of the Road and The Sot-Weed Factor , and the Pynchon of The Crying of Lot 49 ... Here's Robert Coover 's 1966 A Public Burning , in which Eisenhower buggers Nixon on-air, and his 1968 A Political Fable , in which

2544-554: A media-saturated society. Wallace's fiction combines narrative modes and authorial voices that incorporate jargon and invented vocabulary, such as self-generated abbreviations and acronyms, long, multi- clause sentences, and an extensive use of explanatory endnotes and footnotes, as in Infinite Jest and the story "Octet" (collected in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men ), and most of his non-fiction after 1996. In

2703-587: A period of sobriety that was insisted upon by its lead actress, Joelle van Dyne. The Québécois separatists seek a replicable master copy of the work to aid in acts of terrorism against the United States. The United States Office of Unspecified Services (O.U.S.) aims to intercept the master copy to prevent mass dissemination and the destabilization of the Organization of North American Nations, or else to find or produce an anti-entertainment that can counter

2862-409: A playful and humorous way: for example, the way Heller and Vonnegut address the events of World War II . The central concept of Heller's Catch-22 is the irony of the now-idiomatic " catch-22 ", and the narrative is structured around a long series of similar ironies. Thomas Pynchon 's The Crying of Lot 49 in particular provides prime examples of playfulness, often including silly wordplay, within

3021-651: A predilection for dogs who'd been abused, and [were] unlikely to find other owners who were going to be patient enough for them". In the early 1990s, Wallace was in a relationship with writer Mary Karr . She later described Wallace as obsessive about her and said the relationship was volatile, with Wallace once throwing a coffee table at her as well as physically forcing her out of a car, leaving her to walk home. In 2018, she alleged that Wallace's biographer D. T. Max underreported Wallace's abuse. Of Max's account of their relationship, she tweeted: "That's about 2% of what happened." She said that Wallace kicked her, climbed up

3180-852: A private two-page suicide note to his wife, arranged part of the manuscript for The Pale King , and hanged himself on the back porch of his house in Claremont, California. Memorial gatherings were held at Pomona College, Amherst College, the University of Arizona, Illinois State University, and on October 23, 2008, at New York University (NYU). The eulogists at NYU included his sister, Amy Wallace-Havens; his literary agent, Bonnie Nadell; Gerry Howard , editor of his first two books; Colin Harrison , an editor at Harper's Magazine ; Michael Pietsch, editor of Infinite Jest and later works; Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at The New Yorker magazine; and

3339-449: A reader's guide have provided insight, but Stephen Burn notes that Wallace privately conceded to Jonathan Franzen that "the story can't fully be made sense of". In an interview with Charlie Rose , Wallace characterized the novel's heavy use of endnotes as a method of disrupting the linearity of the text while maintaining some sense of narrative cohesion. In a separate interview on Michael Silverblatt 's radio show Bookworm , Wallace said

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3498-547: A senior thesis in philosophy and modal logic that was awarded the Gail Kennedy Memorial Prize and posthumously published as Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will (2010). Wallace adapted his honors thesis in English as the manuscript of his first novel, The Broom of the System (1987), and committed to being a writer. He told David Lipsky : "Writing The Broom of the System , I felt like I

3657-408: A serious context. For example, it contains characters named Mike Fallopian and Stanley Koteks and a radio station called KCUF, while the novel as a whole has a serious subject and a complex structure. Since postmodernism represents a decentred concept of the universe in which individual works are not isolated creations, much of the focus in the study of postmodern literature is on intertextuality :

3816-480: A single work. His writing comments on the fragmentation of thought, the relationship between happiness and boredom, and the psychological tension between the beauty and hideousness of the human body. According to Wallace, "fiction's about what it is to be a fucking human being", and he said he wanted to write "morally passionate, passionately moral fiction" that could help the reader "become less alone inside". In his Kenyon College commencement address, Wallace described

3975-661: A stage play in 2000 by Dylan McCullough. This was the first theatrical adaptation of Wallace's work. The play, Hideous Men , was also directed by McCullough, and premiered at the New York International Fringe Festival in August 2000. Brief Interviews was also adapted by director Marc Caellas as a play, Brief Interviews with Hideous Writers , which premiered at Fundación Tomás Eloy Martinez in Buenos Aires on November 4, 2011. In 2012 it

4134-523: A thought experiment by Robert Nozick . Infinite Jest was marketed heavily, and Wallace had to adapt to being a public figure. He was interviewed in national magazines and went on a 10-city book tour. Publisher Little, Brown equated the book's heft with its importance in marketing and sent a series of cryptic teaser postcards to 4,000 people, announcing a novel of "infinite pleasure" and "infinite style". Rolling Stone sent reporter David Lipsky to follow Wallace on his "triumphant" book tour—the first time

4293-590: A tuxedo T-shirt while eating in the ship's dining room. The 2015 film The End of the Tour is based on conversations David Lipsky had with Wallace, transcribed in Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself (2010). Jason Segel played Wallace, and Jesse Eisenberg Lipsky. The film won an Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature at the Sarasota Film Festival , and Segel was nominated for

4452-417: A unified North American superstate known as the Organization of North American Nations, or O.N.A.N. (an allusion to onanism ). Corporations are allowed the opportunity to bid for and purchase naming rights for each calendar year, replacing traditional numerical designations with ostensibly honorary monikers bearing corporate names. Although the narrative is fragmented and spans several "named" years, most of

4611-413: A wide range of inhabitants, just as Infinite Jest is mostly in a realistic Boston with a varied population.) In one scene, Hal, on the phone with Orin, says that clipping his toenails into a wastebasket "now seems like an exercise in telemachry." Orin then asks whether Hal meant telemetry. Christopher Bartlett has argued that Hal's mistake is a direct reference to Telemachus, who for the first four books of

4770-619: Is " Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote " by Jorge Luis Borges , a story with significant references to Don Quixote which is also a good example of intertextuality with its references to Medieval romances. Don Quixote is a common reference with postmodernists, for example Kathy Acker 's novel Don Quixote: Which Was a Dream . References to Don Quixote can also be found in Paul Auster 's post-modern detective story, City of Glass . Another example of intertextuality in postmodernism

4929-473: Is "often considered as the postmodern novel, redefining both postmodernism and the novel in general." The 1980s, however, also saw several key works of postmodern literature. Don DeLillo 's White Noise , Paul Auster 's New York Trilogy and this is also the era when literary critics wrote some of the classic works of literary history, charting American postmodern literature: works by Brian McHale , Linda Hutcheon , and Paul Maltby who argues that it

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5088-420: Is John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor which deals with Ebenezer Cooke 's poem of the same name . Related to postmodern intertextuality, pastiche means to combine, or "paste" together, multiple elements. In Postmodernist literature this can be a homage to or a parody of past styles. It can be seen as a representation of the chaotic, pluralistic, or information-drenched aspects of postmodern society. It can be

5247-522: Is a part) that enjoy any significant relation to the television whose weird, pretty hand has my generation by the throat. I'm going to argue that irony and ridicule are entertaining and effective, and that, at the same time, they are agents of a great despair and stasis in U.S. culture, and that, for aspiring fictionists, they pose terrifically vexing problems. Wallace used many forms of irony, but tended to focus on individual persons' continued longing for earnest, unself-conscious experience and communication in

5406-404: Is a solution. He can say "As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly". At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly it is no longer possible to talk innocently, he will nevertheless say what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her in an age of lost innocence. Novelist David Foster Wallace in his 1990 essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction" makes

5565-529: Is a style popular among Latin American writers (and can also be considered its own genre) in which supernatural elements are treated as mundane (a famous example being the practical-minded and ultimately dismissive treatment of an apparently angelic figure in Gabriel García Márquez 's " A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings "). Though the technique has its roots in traditional storytelling, it was

5724-528: Is a term coined by Alastair Fowler to refer to a specific type of metafiction in which the story is about the process of creation. According to Fowler, "the poioumenon is calculated to offer opportunities to explore the boundaries of fiction and reality—the limits of narrative truth." In many cases, the book will be about the process of creating the book or includes a central metaphor for this process. Common examples of this are Thomas Carlyle 's Sartor Resartus , and Laurence Sterne 's Tristram Shandy , which

5883-532: Is about the narrator's frustrated attempt to tell his own story. A significant postmodern example is Vladimir Nabokov 's Pale Fire (1962), in which the narrator, Kinbote, claims he is writing an analysis of John Shade's long poem "Pale Fire", but the narrative of the relationship between Shade and Kinbote is presented in what is ostensibly the footnotes to the poem. Similarly, the self-conscious narrator in Salman Rushdie 's Midnight's Children parallels

6042-401: Is adopted, devoid, in most part, of articles and conjunctions. The text is interspersed with lacunae and everyday language combines with poetry and biblical references leading up to syntax disruption and distortion of grammar. A sense of alienation of character and world is created by a language medium invented to form a kind of intermittent syntax structure which complements the illustration of

6201-671: Is an imported grand récit that is incompatible with the cultural production of Latin America. Along with Beckett and Borges, a commonly cited transitional figure is Vladimir Nabokov ; like Beckett and Borges, Nabokov started publishing before the beginning of postmodernity (1926 in Russian, 1941 in English). Though his most famous novel, Lolita (1955), could be considered a modernist or a postmodernist novel, his later work (specifically Pale Fire in 1962 and Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle in 1969) are more clearly postmodern. Some of

6360-621: Is another described as a "magic realist". Postmodernists such as Italo Calvino ( The Baron in the Trees , 1957), and Salman Rushdie ( The Ground Beneath Her Feet , 1999), commonly use magic realism in their work. A fusion of fabulism with magic realism is apparent in such early 21st-century American short stories as Kevin Brockmeier 's " The Ceiling ", Dan Chaon 's "Big Me", Jacob M. Appel 's "Exposure", and Elizabeth Graver 's "The Mourning Door". Fredric Jameson called postmodernism

6519-563: Is at the center of the new discipline of "Wallace Studies", which, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education , "... is on its way to becoming a robust scholarly enterprise." Not all critics were as laudatory. Some early reviews, such as Michiko Kakutani 's in The New York Times , were mixed, recognizing the inventiveness of the writing but criticizing the length and plot. She called the novel "a vast, encyclopedic compendium of whatever seems to have crossed Wallace's mind." In

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6678-446: Is essentially a series of clichés taken from a language textbook. One of the most important figures to be categorized as both Absurdist and Postmodern is Samuel Beckett. The work of Beckett is often seen as marking the shift from modernism to postmodernism in literature. He had close ties with modernism because of his friendship with James Joyce; however, his work helped shape the development of literature away from modernism. Joyce, one of

6837-504: Is in keeping with other erroneous French words and phrases in the novel.) They are one of many such groups that developed after the United States coerced Canada and Mexico into joining the Organization of North American Nations (O.N.A.N.), but the A.F.R. is the most deadly and extremist. While other separatist groups are willing to settle for nationhood, the A.F.R. wants Canada to secede from O.N.A.N. and to reject America's forced gift of its polluted "Great Concavity" (or, Hal and Orin speculate,

6996-577: Is marked by moments in critical theory: Jacques Derrida 's " Structure, Sign, and Play " lecture in 1966 or as late as Ihab Hassan 's usage in The Dismemberment of Orpheus in 1971. Brian McHale details his main thesis on this shift, although many postmodern works have developed out of modernism, modernism is characterised by an epistemological dominant while postmodern works are primarily concerned with questions of ontology. Though postmodernist literature does not include everything written in

7155-544: Is more complicated than a single reference to another text. Robert Coover 's Pinocchio in Venice , for example, links Pinocchio to Thomas Mann 's Death in Venice . Also, Umberto Eco 's The Name of the Rose takes on the form of a detective novel and makes references to authors such as Aristotle , Sir Arthur Conan Doyle , and Borges . An early 20th century example of intertextuality which influenced later postmodernists

7314-682: Is occasionally listed as a postmodernist, although he started writing in the 1920s. The influence of his experiments with metafiction and magic realism was not fully realized in the Anglo-American world until the postmodern period. Ultimately, this is seen as the highest stratification of criticism among scholars. Other early 20th-century novels such as Raymond Roussel 's Impressions d'Afrique  [ fr ] (1910) and Locus Solus (1914), and Giorgio de Chirico 's Hebdomeros (1929) have also been identified as important "postmodern precursor[s]". Postmodern literature represents

7473-468: Is often cited as a means of distinguishing modern and postmodern literature. The poem is fragmentary and employs pastiche like much postmodern literature, but the speaker in The Waste Land says, "these fragments I have shored against my ruins". Modernist literature sees fragmentation and extreme subjectivity as an existential crisis, or Freudian internal conflict, a problem that must be solved, and

7632-411: Is often humorous yet explores melancholy deeply. The novel's narration mostly alternates between third-person limited and omniscient points of view, but also includes several first-person accounts. Eschewing chronological plot development and straightforward resolution—a concern often mentioned in reviews—the novel supports a wide range of readings. At various times Wallace said that he intended for

7791-421: Is pretending that those are its goals to put pressure on Canada to let Quebec secede). The A.F.R. seeks the master copy of Infinite Jest as a terrorist weapon to achieve its goals. The A.F.R. has its roots in a childhood game in which miners' sons would line up alongside a train track and compete to be the last to jump across the path of an oncoming train, a game in which many were killed or rendered legless (hence

7950-415: Is related to mastery." Although Ercolino's "maximalist" examples overlapped with LeClair's earlier systems novel examples, Ercolino did not see "mastery" as a defining feature. According to Ercolino, "it would make more sense to speak of an ambiguous relationship between maximalist narrative forms and power." Many modernist critics, notably B.R. Myers in his polemic A Reader's Manifesto , attack

8109-400: Is sometimes used as a rough boundary for postmodernism's start. Irish novelist Flann O'Brien completed The Third Policeman in 1939. It was rejected for publication and remained supposedly lost until published posthumously in 1967. A revised version called The Dalkey Archive was published before the original in 1964, two years before O'Brien died. Notwithstanding its dilatory appearance,

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8268-517: Is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. ... The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Wallace covered Senator John McCain 's 2000 presidential campaign and the September 11 attacks for Rolling Stone ; cruise ships (in what became the title essay of his first nonfiction book), state fairs , and tornadoes for Harper's Magazine ;

8427-548: Is this an exclusive list of features. Linda Hutcheon claimed postmodern fiction as a whole could be characterized by the ironic quote marks, that much of it can be taken as tongue-in-cheek. This irony , along with black humor and the general concept of "play" (related to Derrida's concept or the ideas advocated by Roland Barthes in The Pleasure of the Text ) are among the most recognizable aspects of postmodernism. Though

8586-540: Is understood as a historical period from the mid-1960s to the present, which is different from the (2) theoretical postmodernism, which encompasses the theories developed by thinkers such as Roland Barthes , Jacques Derrida , Michel Foucault and others. The third category is the "cultural postmodernism", which includes film, literature, visual arts, etc. that feature postmodern elements. Postmodern literature is, in this sense, part of cultural postmodernism. Late 19th and early 20th century playwrights whose work influenced

8745-484: The London Review of Books , Dale Peck wrote of the novel, "... it is, in a word, terrible. Other words I might use include bloated, boring, gratuitous, and—perhaps especially—uncontrolled." Harold Bloom , Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University , called it "just awful" and written with "no discernible talent" (in the novel, Bloom's own work is called "turgid"). In a review of Wallace's work up to

8904-527: The Los Angeles Times Magazine . The book was edited by publisher Little, Brown and Company's Michael Pietsch. Pietsch made suggestions and recommendations to Wallace, but every editing decision was Wallace's. He accepted cuts amounting to around 250 manuscript pages from his original submission. He resisted many changes for reasons that he usually explained. The novel gets its name from Hamlet , Act V, Scene 1, in which Hamlet holds

9063-516: The Odyssey of Homer , which Nancy Felson hails as the exemplar of the polytropic audience and its engagement with a work. In The Maximalist Novel: From Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow to Roberto Bolano's 2666 , (2014) Stefano Ercolino characterised maximalism as "an aesthetically hybrid genre of the contemporary novel that develops in the second half of the twentieth century in the United States, then 'emigrates' to Europe and Latin America at

9222-586: The Aga Khan Prize for Fiction , awarded by editors of The Paris Review for one of the stories in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men , which had been published in the magazine. In 2002, Wallace moved to Claremont, California , to become the first Roy E. Disney endowed Professor of Creative Writing and Professor of English at Pomona College . He taught one or two undergraduate courses per semester and focused on writing. Wallace delivered

9381-788: The Bataan Death March , the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki , the Holocaust , the bombing of Dresden , the Katyn massacre , the fire-bombing of Tokyo , and Japanese American internment ). It could also imply a reaction to significant post-war events: the beginning of the Cold War , the Civil Rights Movement , postcolonialism ( Postcolonial literature ), and the rise of the personal computer ( Cyberpunk and Hypertext fiction ). Some further argue that

9540-534: The Cat in the Hat runs for president. Hans-Peter Wagner offers this approach to defining postmodern literature: Postmodernism ... can be used at least in two ways – firstly, to give a label to the period after 1968 (which would then encompass all forms of fiction, both innovative and traditional), and secondly, to describe the highly experimental literature produced by writers beginning with Lawrence Durrell and John Fowles in

9699-540: The Catholic Church , but "flunk[ed] the period of inquiry". He later attended a Mennonite church. Wallace attended Amherst College , his father's alma mater, where he majored in English and philosophy and graduated summa cum laude in 1985. Among other extracurricular activities, he participated in glee club ; his sister recalls that he "had a lovely singing voice". In studying philosophy, Wallace pursued modal logic and mathematics, and presented in 1985

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9858-573: The Independent Spirit Award for Best Male Lead . "Partridge", a Season 5 episode of NBC 's Parks and Recreation , repeatedly references Infinite Jest , of which the show's co-creator, Michael Schur , is a noted fan. Schur also directed the music video for The Decemberists ' "Calamity Song", which depicts the Eschaton game from Infinite Jest. Twelve of the interviews from Brief Interviews with Hideous Men were adapted as

10017-613: The Lebanese Civil War and various real life political figures. Thomas Pynchon 's Mason and Dixon also employs this concept; for example, a scene featuring George Washington smoking marijuana is included. John Fowles deals similarly with the Victorian period in The French Lieutenant's Woman . Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five has been said to feature a metafictional, " Janus-headed " outlook in

10176-568: The Los Angeles Times , The Washington Post , The New York Times , and The Philadelphia Inquirer . In the November 2007 issue of The Atlantic , which commemorated the magazine's 150th anniversary, Wallace was among the authors, artists, politicians and others who wrote short pieces on "the future of the American idea". These and other essays appear in three collections, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again , Consider

10335-739: The New York School , the San Francisco Renaissance , and so on. These writers have occasionally also been referred to as the "Postmoderns" (see especially references by Charles Olson and the Grove anthologies edited by Donald Allen ). Though this is now a less common usage of "postmodern", references to these writers as "postmodernists" still appear and many writers associated with this group ( John Ashbery , Richard Brautigan , Gilbert Sorrentino , and so on) appear often on lists of postmodern writers. One writer associated with

10494-601: The Odyssey believes that his father is dead. Links to The Brothers Karamazov have been analyzed by Timothy Jacobs, who sees Orin representing the nihilistic Dmitri, Hal standing for Ivan and Mario the simple and good Alyosha . The film so entertaining that its viewers lose interest in anything else has been likened to the Monty Python sketch " The Funniest Joke in the World ", as well as to "the experience machine ",

10653-522: The US Open tournament for Tennis magazine; Roger Federer for The New York Times ; the director David Lynch and the pornography industry for Première magazine; the tennis player Michael Joyce for Esquire ; the movie-special-effects industry for Waterstone's magazine; conservative talk radio host John Ziegler for The Atlantic ; and a Maine lobster festival for Gourmet magazine. He also reviewed books in several genres for

10812-504: The Vietnam War , features a character named Tim O'Brien; though O'Brien was a Vietnam veteran, the book is a work of fiction and O'Brien calls into question the fictionality of the characters and incidents throughout the book. One story in the book, "How to Tell a True War Story", questions the nature of telling stories. Factual retellings of war stories, the narrator says, would be unbelievable, and heroic, moral war stories don't capture

10971-514: The irony and metafiction associated with postmodernism and explore a post-postmodern or metamodern style. In the essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction" (written 1990, published 1993), he proposed that television has an ironic influence on fiction, and urged literary authors to eschew TV's shallow rebelliousness: I want to convince you that irony, poker-faced silence, and fear of ridicule are distinctive of those features of contemporary U.S. culture (of which cutting-edge fiction

11130-514: The "Great Concavity" by Americans due to the resulting displacement of the border. There are several major interwoven narratives, including: These narratives are connected via a film, Infinite Jest , also called "the Entertainment" or "the samizdat ". The film is so compelling that its viewers lose all interest in anything other than repeatedly viewing it, and thus eventually die. It was James Incandenza's final work. He completed it during

11289-420: The "cultural logic of late capitalism". " Late capitalism " implies that society has moved past the industrial age and into the information age. Likewise, Jean Baudrillard claimed postmodernity was defined by a shift into hyperreality in which simulations have replaced the real. In postmodernity people are inundated with information, technology has become a central focus in many lives, and one's understanding of

11448-643: The Beat Generation who appears most often on lists of postmodern writers is William S. Burroughs . Burroughs published Naked Lunch in Paris in 1959 and in America in 1961; this is considered by some the first truly postmodern novel because it is fragmentary, with no central narrative arc; it employs pastiche to fold in elements from popular genres such as detective fiction and science fiction ; it's full of parody, paradox, and playfulness; and, according to some accounts, friends Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg edited

11607-462: The Goon Squad (2011). These works also further develop the postmodern form. Sometimes the term "postmodernism" is used to discuss many different things ranging from architecture to historical theory to philosophy and film . Because of this fact, several people distinguish between several forms of postmodernism and thus suggest that there are three forms of postmodernism: (1) Postmodernity

11766-655: The Lobster and the posthumous Both Flesh and Not , the last of which contains some of Wallace's earliest work, including his first published essay, "Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young". Wallace's tennis writing was compiled into a volume titled String Theory: David Foster Wallace on Tennis , published in 2016. Some writers have found parts of Wallace's nonfiction implausible. Jonathan Franzen has said that he believes Wallace made up dialogue and incidents: "those things didn't actually happen". Of

11925-496: The System (1987) garnered national attention and critical praise. In The New York Times , Caryn James called it a "manic, human, flawed extravaganza ... emerging straight from the excessive tradition of Stanley Elkin 's The Franchiser , Thomas Pynchon 's V. , [and] John Irving 's World According to Garp ". In 1991, Wallace began teaching literature as an adjunct professor at Emerson College in Boston. The next year, at

12084-490: The actual achievement of order and meaning becomes unlikely. Gertrude Stein 's playful experiment with metafiction and genre in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) has been interpreted as postmodern. As with all stylistic eras, no definite dates exist for the rise and fall of postmodernism's popularity. 1941, the year in which Irish novelist James Joyce and English novelist Virginia Woolf both died,

12243-473: The aesthetics of postmodernism include August Strindberg , Luigi Pirandello , and Bertolt Brecht . Another precursor to postmodernism was Dadaism , which challenged the authority of the artist and highlighted elements of chance, whim, parody, and irony. Tristan Tzara claimed in "How to Make a Dadaist Poem" that to create a Dadaist poem one had only to put random words in a hat and pull them out one by one. Another way Dadaism influenced postmodern literature

12402-467: The album A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships by The 1975 , borrows its title from the opening line of Infinite Jest . Matty Healy , The 1975's lead singer, said in an interview with Pitchfork that he was inspired by the novel after reading it during a stint in rehabilitation: I was reading [ Infinite Jest ] when I was in rehab. There was no one there. It was me and my nurses, who'd come in and check on me, and then Angela [the protagonist of

12561-436: The artist is often cited as the one to solve it. Postmodernists, however, often demonstrate that this chaos is insurmountable; the artist is impotent, and the only recourse against "ruin" is to play within the chaos. Playfulness is present in many modernist works (Joyce's Finnegans Wake or Woolf's Orlando , for example) and they may seem very similar to postmodern works, but with postmodernism playfulness becomes central and

12720-480: The author presents multiple possible events occurring simultaneously—in one section the babysitter is murdered while in another section nothing happens and so on—yet no version of the story is favored as the correct version. Magic realism may be literary work marked by the use of still, sharply defined, smoothly painted images of figures and objects depicted in a surrealistic manner. The themes and subjects are often imaginary, somewhat outlandish and fantastic and with

12879-437: The author provides a general context and then allows the reader's imagination to shape the story. Among those categorized as postmodernist, literary minimalism is most commonly associated with Jon Fosse and especially Samuel Beckett . Fragmentation is another important aspect of postmodern literature. Various elements, concerning plot, characters, themes, imagery and factual references are fragmented and dispersed throughout

13038-416: The barriers between drama, fiction, and poetry, with texts of the collection being almost entirely composed of echoes and reiterations of his previous work ... He was definitely one of the fathers of the postmodern movement in fiction which has continued undermining the ideas of logical coherence in narration, formal plot, regular time sequence, and psychologically explained characters. The " Beat Generation "

13197-411: The beginning of postmodern literature could be marked by significant publications or literary events. For example, some mark the beginning of postmodernism with the first publication of John Hawkes ' The Cannibal in 1949, the first performance of En attendant Godot in 1953 ( Waiting for Godot , 1955), the first publication of Howl in 1956 or of Naked Lunch in 1959. For others the beginning

13356-398: The book guided by chance. He is also noted, along with Brion Gysin , for the creation of the " cut-up " technique, a technique (similar to Tzara's "Dadaist Poem") in which words and phrases are cut from a newspaper or other publication and rearranged to form a new message. This is the technique he used to create novels such as Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded . Magic realism

13515-457: The book received "rave" reviews based on 11 critic reviews, with eight "raves" and three "positive". In the Review of Contemporary Fiction , Steven Moore called the book "a profound study of the postmodern condition". In 2004, Chad Harbach wrote that, in retrospect, Infinite Jest "now looks like the central American novel of the past thirty years, a dense star for lesser work to orbit". In

13674-454: The broader pastiche of the postmodern novel). In Robert Coover 's 1977 novel The Public Burning , Coover mixes historically inaccurate accounts of Richard Nixon interacting with historical figures and fictional characters such as Uncle Sam and Betty Crocker . Pastiche can instead involve a compositional technique, for example the cut-up technique employed by Burroughs. Another example is B. S. Johnson 's 1969 novel The Unfortunates ; it

13833-416: The collapse of the American empire. Fabulation is a term sometimes used interchangeably with metafiction and relates to pastiche and Magic Realism. It is a rejection of realism which embraces the notion that literature is a created work and not bound by notions of mimesis and verisimilitude . Thus, fabulation challenges some traditional notions of literature—the traditional structure of a novel or role of

13992-462: The commencement address to the 2005 graduating class at Kenyon College . The speech was published as a book, This Is Water , in 2009. In May 2013, parts of the speech were used in a popular online video, also titled "This Is Water". Bonnie Nadell was Wallace's literary agent during his entire career. Michael Pietsch was his editor on Infinite Jest . Wallace died in 2008. In March 2009, Little, Brown and Company announced that it would publish

14151-493: The connection between the rise of postmodernism and the rise of television with its tendency toward self-reference and the ironic juxtaposition of what's seen and what's said. This, he claims, explains the preponderance of pop culture references in postmodern literature: It was in post-atomic America that pop influences on literature became something more than technical. About the time television first gasped and sucked air, mass popular U.S. culture seemed to become High-Art-viable as

14310-443: The creation of his book to the creation of chutney and the creation of independent India. Anagrams (1970), by David R. Slavitt , describes a week in the life of a poet and his creation of a poem which, by the last couple of pages, proves remarkably prophetic. In The Comforters , Muriel Spark 's protagonist hears the sound of a typewriter and voices that later may transform into the novel itself. Jan Křesadlo purports to be merely

14469-498: The description of dreams should play a greater role in the creation of literature. He used automatism to create his novel Nadja and used photographs to replace description as a parody of the overly-descriptive novelists he often criticized. Surrealist René Magritte 's experiments with signification are used as examples by Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault . Foucault also uses examples from Jorge Luis Borges , an important direct influence on many postmodernist fiction writers. He

14628-536: The earliest examples of postmodern literature are from the 1950s: William Gaddis ' The Recognitions (1955), Vladimir Nabokov 's Lolita (1955), and William Burroughs ' Naked Lunch (1959). It then rose to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s with the publication of Joseph Heller 's Catch-22 in 1961, John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse in 1968, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five in 1969, and many others. Thomas Pynchon 's 1973 novel Gravity's Rainbow

14787-463: The entire work. In general, there is an interrupted sequence of events, character development and action which can at first glance look modern. Fragmentation purports, however, to depict a metaphysically unfounded, chaotic universe. It can occur in language, sentence structure or grammar. In Z213: Exit , a fictional diary by Greek writer Dimitris Lyacos , one of the major exponents of fragmentation in postmodern literature, an almost telegraphic style

14946-676: The essays "Shipping Out" and "Ticket to the Fair", John Cook has remarked that in Wallace's nonfiction: Wallace encounters pitch-perfect characters who speak comedically crystalline lines and place him in hilariously absurd situations...I used both stories [when teaching journalism] as examples of the inescapable temptation to shave, embellish, and invent narratives. Wallace's father said that David had suffered from major depressive disorder for more than 20 years and that antidepressant medication had allowed him to be productive. Wallace suffered what

15105-534: The exemplars of modernism, celebrated the possibility of language; Beckett had a revelation in 1945 that, in order to escape the shadow of Joyce, he must focus on the poverty of language and man as a failure. His later work, likewise, featured characters stuck in inescapable situations attempting impotently to communicate whose only recourse is to play, to make the best of what they have. As Hans-Peter Wagner says: Mostly concerned with what he saw as impossibilities in fiction (identity of characters; reliable consciousness;

15264-438: The fiction pages of The New Yorker , herald either a new chapter of postmodernism or possibly post-postmodernism. Many of these authors emphasize a strong urge for sincerity in literature. Several themes and techniques are indicative of writing in the postmodern era. These themes and techniques are often used together. For example, metafiction and pastiche are often used for irony. These are not used by all postmodernists, nor

15423-483: The film's effects. Joelle seeks treatment for substance abuse problems at Ennet House. A.F.R. member (and possible O.U.S. double agent) Rémy Marathe visits Ennet House, aiming to find Joelle and a lead to the master copy of "the Entertainment". Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents (A.F.R.), the Wheelchair Assassins, are a Québécois separatist group. (The use of "rollents" where "roulants" would be correct

15582-540: The first chapter of his 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five is about the process of writing the novel and calls attention to his own presence throughout the novel. Though much of the novel has to do with Vonnegut's own experiences during the firebombing of Dresden, Vonnegut continually points out the artificiality of the central narrative arc which contains obviously fictional elements such as aliens and time travel. Similarly, Tim O'Brien 's 1990 short story cycle The Things They Carried , about one platoon's experiences during

15741-535: The first half of our century under his belt, but not on his back. Without lapsing into moral or artistic simplism, shoddy craftsmanship, Madison Avenue venality, or either false or real naiveté, he nevertheless aspires to a fiction more democratic in its appeal than such late-Modernist marvels as Beckett 's Texts for Nothing ... The ideal Postmodernist novel will somehow rise above the quarrel between realism and irrealism, formalism and "contentism", pure and committed literature, coterie fiction and junk fiction... Many of

15900-464: The form of the novel became almost disintegrated. Catch-22 was a collage; if not in structure, then in the ideology of the novel itself ... Without being aware of it, I was part of a near-movement in fiction. While I was writing Catch-22 , J. P. Donleavy was writing The Ginger Man , Jack Kerouac was writing On the Road , Ken Kesey was writing One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest , Thomas Pynchon

16059-403: The future of fiction?", Sam Leith compared Tom McCarthy's The Making of Incarnation with Dave Eggers' The Every . Leith wrote, "The question ultimately posed, or pointed to, by systems novels is: can novels do without people? And the answer I would give is: not completely. The problem is, perhaps, that the part of our minds that responds to old-fashioned novels hasn't changed as fast as

16218-470: The horrific and the inexplicable. It has been applied, for instance, to the work of Jorge Luis Borges , author of Historia universal de la infamia (1935) is considered a bridge between modernism and postmodernism in world literature. Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez is also regarded as a notable exponent of this kind of fiction—especially his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude . The Cuban Alejo Carpentier ( The Kingdom of This World , 1949)

16377-458: The human condition as daily crises and chronic disillusionment and warned against succumbing to solipsism , invoking the existential values of compassion and mindfulness: The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. ... The only thing that's capital-T True

16536-443: The idea of employing these in literature did not start with the postmodernists (the modernists were often playful and ironic), they became central features in many postmodern works. In fact, several novelists later to be labeled postmodern were first collectively labeled black humorists: John Barth , Joseph Heller , William Gaddis , Kurt Vonnegut , Bruce Jay Friedman , etc. It is common for postmodernists to treat serious subjects in

16695-432: The idea of parody itself. Metafiction is often employed to undermine the authority of the author, for unexpected narrative shifts, to advance a story in a unique way, for emotional distance, or to comment on the act of storytelling. For example, Italo Calvino 's 1979 novel If on a winter's night a traveler is about a reader attempting to read a novel of the same name. Kurt Vonnegut also commonly used this technique:

16854-532: The label "postmodern", wrote an influential essay in 1967 called " The Literature of Exhaustion " and in 1980 published "The Literature of Replenishment" in order to clarify the earlier essay. "The Literature of Exhaustion" was about the need for a new era in literature after modernism had exhausted itself. In "The Literature of Replenishment" Barth says: My ideal Postmodernist author neither merely repudiates nor merely imitates either his 20th-century Modernist parents or his 19th-century premodernist grandparents. He has

17013-546: The literary theorist Keith Hopper regards The Third Policeman as one of the first of that genre they call the postmodern novel. The prefix "post", however, does not necessarily imply a new era. Rather, it could also indicate a reaction against modernism in the wake of the Second World War (with its disrespect for human rights, just confirmed in the Geneva Convention , through the rape of Nanjing ,

17172-447: The magazine had sent a reporter to profile a young author in 10 years. The interview was never published in the magazine but became Lipsky's New York Times -bestselling book Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself (2010), of which the 2015 movie The End of the Tour is an adaptation. Early reviews contributed to Infinite Jest ' s hype, many of them describing it as a momentous literary event. According to Book Marks ,

17331-414: The main character's subconscious fears and paranoia in the course of his exploration of a seemingly chaotic world. Patricia Lockwood 's 2021 Booker-shortlisted novel, No One Is Talking About This is a recent example of fragmentation, employing the technique to consider the effects of internet usage on quality of life and the creative process. John Barth , a postmodernist novelist who talks often about

17490-434: The major narrative threads: Infinite Jest is a postmodern encyclopedic novel , famous for its length, detail and digressions involving 388 endnotes, some of which themselves have footnotes. It has also been called metamodernist and hysterical realist . Wallace's "encyclopedic display of knowledge" incorporates media theory , linguistics, film studies, sport, addiction, science, and issues of national identity. The book

17649-559: The manuscript of an unfinished novel, The Pale King , that Wallace had been working on before his death. Pietsch pieced the novel together from pages and notes Wallace left behind. Several excerpts were published in The New Yorker and other magazines. The Pale King was published on April 15, 2011, and received generally positive reviews. Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times wrote that The Pale King "showcases [Wallace's] embrace of discontinuity; his fascination with both

17808-402: The maximalist novel as being disorganized, sterile and filled with language play for its own sake, empty of emotional commitment—and therefore empty of value as a novel. Yet there are counter-examples, such as Pynchon's Mason & Dixon and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest where postmodern narrative coexists with emotional commitment. In a 2022 GQ article, "Is the 'systems novel'

17967-639: The meta and the microscopic, postmodern pyrotechnics and old-fashioned storytelling; and his ongoing interest in contemporary America's obsession with self-gratification and entertainment." The book was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Throughout his career, Wallace published short fiction in periodicals such as The New Yorker , GQ , Harper's Magazine , Playboy , The Paris Review , Mid-American Review , Conjunctions , Esquire , Open City , Puerto del Sol , and Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern . Wallace wanted to progress beyond

18126-542: The narrator, for example—and integrates other traditional notions of storytelling, including fantastical elements, such as magic and myth, or elements from popular genres such as science fiction . By some accounts, the term was coined by Robert Scholes in his book The Fabulators . Strong examples of fabulation in contemporary literature are found in Salman Rushdie 's Haroun and the Sea of Stories . Poioumenon (plural: poioumena; from Ancient Greek : ποιούμενον , "product")

18285-565: The novel has since sold more than a million copies worldwide. Wallace began Infinite Jest , "or something like it", at various times between 1986 and 1989. His efforts in 1991–92 were more productive; by the end of 1993, he had a working draft of the novel. From early 1992 until the novel's publication, excerpts from various drafts appeared sporadically in magazines and literary journals including Harvard Review , Grand Street , Conjunctions , Review of Contemporary Fiction , Harper's Magazine , The Iowa Review , The New Yorker and

18444-412: The novel's plot to resolve, but indirectly; responding to his editor's concerns about the lack of resolution, he said "the answers all [exist], but just past the last page". Long after publication Wallace maintained this position, stating that the novel "does resolve, but it resolves ... outside of the right frame of the picture. You can get a pretty good idea, I think, of what happens". Critical reviews and

18603-581: The novelist and theorist Umberto Eco explains his idea of postmodernism as a kind of double-coding, and as a transhistorical phenomenon: [P]ostmodernism ... [is] not a trend to be chronologically defined, but, rather, an ideal category – or better still a Kunstwollen , a way of operating. ... I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows that he cannot say to her "I love you madly", because he knows that she knows (and that she knows he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland . Still there

18762-422: The play, the son's task is to fight incipient mental breakdown in order to redeem his father's reputation. Another link is to the Odyssey , wherein the son Telemachus (Hal) has to grow apart from his dominating mother Penelope (Avril) and discover the truth about his absent father Odysseus (James). (That pattern is also reproduced in the novel Ulysses , set in a realistic version of Dublin populated by

18921-467: The plotting and notes had a fractal structure modeled after the Sierpiński gasket . The novel touches on many topics, including addiction (to drugs, but also to sex and fame), withdrawal, recovery, death, family relationships, absent or dead parents, mental health, suicide, sadness, entertainment, film theory , media theory , linguistics , science, Quebec separatism , national identity , and tennis as

19080-826: The postmodern aesthetic. The work of Alfred Jarry , the Surrealists, Antonin Artaud , Luigi Pirandello and so on also influenced the work of playwrights from the Theatre of the Absurd . The term "Theatre of the Absurd" was coined by Martin Esslin to describe a tendency in theatre in the 1950s; he related it to Albert Camus 's concept of the absurd . The plays of the Theatre of the Absurd parallel postmodern fiction in many ways. For example, The Bald Soprano by Eugène Ionesco

19239-498: The postmodern period, several post-war developments in literature (such as the Theatre of the Absurd , the Beat Generation , and magic realism ) have significant similarities. These developments are occasionally collectively labeled "postmodern"; more commonly, some key figures ( Samuel Beckett , William S. Burroughs , Jorge Luis Borges , Julio Cortázar and Gabriel García Márquez ) are cited as significant contributors to

19398-488: The real is mediated by simulations of the real. Many works of fiction have dealt with this aspect of postmodernity with characteristic irony and pastiche. For example, the virtual reality of "empathy boxes" in Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in which a new technology-based religion called Mercerism arises. Another example is Don DeLillo 's White Noise presents characters who are bombarded with

19557-458: The related term systems novel , the sprawling canvas and fragmented narrative of such writers as Dave Eggers and David Foster Wallace has generated controversy on the "purpose" of a novel as narrative and the standards by which it should be judged. The postmodern position is that the style of a novel must be appropriate to what it depicts and represents, and points back to such examples in previous ages as Gargantua by François Rabelais and

19716-534: The relationship between one text (a novel for example) and another or one text within the interwoven fabric of literary history. Intertextuality in postmodern literature can be a reference or parallel to another literary work , an extended discussion of a work, or the adoption of a style. In postmodern literature this commonly manifests as references to fairy tales—as in works by Margaret Atwood , Donald Barthelme , and many others—or in references to popular genres such as sci-fi and detective fiction. Often intertextuality

19875-590: The reliability of language itself; and the rubrication of literature in genres) Beckett's experiments with narrative form and with the disintegration of narration and character in fiction and drama won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. His works published after 1969 are mostly meta-literary attempts that must be read in light of his own theories and previous works and the attempt to deconstruct literary forms and genres. ... Beckett's last text published during his lifetime, Stirrings Still (1988), breaks down

20034-693: The sake of irony. Historiographic metafiction (see above ) is an example of this. Distortions in time are central features in many of Kurt Vonnegut 's nonlinear novels, the most famous of which is perhaps Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five becoming "unstuck in time". In Flight to Canada , Ishmael Reed deals playfully with anachronisms, Abraham Lincoln using a telephone for example. Time may also overlap, repeat, or bifurcate into multiple possibilities. For example, in Robert Coover 's "The Babysitter" from Pricksongs & Descants ,

20193-399: The self's mastery of itself, economic and political hegemony, force in history and culture, the transforming power of science and technology, the control of information and art. These novels are also about the size and scale of contemporary experience: how multiplicity and magnitude create new relations and new proportions among persons and entities, how quantity affects quality, how massiveness

20352-526: The side of her house at night, and followed her five-year-old son home from school. Wallace also attempted to buy a gun to kill Karr's ex-husband. In a 2015 NPR interview, Karr stated that, "I'm not the only woman [Wallace] was violent with. It was, it's common knowledge among women who dated him, you know, that he was violent." Since publicizing Wallace's abuse, Karr says women have contacted her to share stories of Wallace hiting, lying, and preying on them, including former students of Wallace. The Broom of

20511-402: The skull of the court jester, Yorick , and says, "Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio : a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is!" Wallace's working title for Infinite Jest was A Failed Entertainment . In the novel's future world, the United States, Canada, and Mexico together compose

20670-496: The song], miles away. I was surrounded by no one, and the book was just open on the front page, as most copies of Infinite Jest are ... nobody reads [ Infinite Jest ] all the way! Everyone our age has got a battered, quarter-read copy of Infinite Jest . Postmodern literature Precursors to postmodern literature include Miguel de Cervantes ' Don Quixote (1605–1615), Laurence Sterne 's Tristram Shandy (1760–1767), James Hogg 's Private Memoires and Convessions of

20829-575: The story takes place during "The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment " (Y.D.A.U.). On the orders of U.S. President Johnny Gentle (a "clean freak" who campaigned on the platform of cleaning up the US while ensuring that no American would be caused any discomfort in the process), much of what used to be the northeastern United States and southeastern Canada has become a giant hazardous waste dump, an area "given" to Canada and known as

20988-530: The suggestion of colleague and supporter Steven Moore , Wallace obtained a position in the English department at Illinois State University . He had begun work on his second novel, Infinite Jest , in 1991, and submitted a draft to his editor in December 1993. After the publication of excerpts throughout 1995, the book was published in 1996. In 1997, Wallace received a MacArthur Fellowship . He also received

21147-638: The term " historiographic metafiction " to refer to works that fictionalize actual historical events or figures; notable examples include The General in His Labyrinth by Gabriel García Márquez (about Simón Bolívar ), Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes (about Gustave Flaubert ), Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow (which features such historical figures as Harry Houdini , Henry Ford , Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria , Booker T. Washington , Sigmund Freud , and Carl Jung ), and Rabih Alameddine 's Koolaids: The Art of War which makes references to

21306-781: The term in relation to Don DeLillo , Tom LeClair chose seven novels as the focus of The Art of Excess . They were: Gravity's Rainbow (by Thomas Pynchon ), Something Happened (by Joseph Heller ), J R (by William Gaddis ), The Public Burning (by Robert Coover ), Women and Men (by Joseph McElroy ), LETTERS (by John Barth ) and Always Coming Home (by Ursula Le Guin ). LeClair's systems novels were all "long, large and dense" and all in some way striving for "mastery", showing similarity to Moby-Dick and Absalom, Absalom! in "range of reference, artistic sophistication, and desire for profound effect." LeClair wrote, "These seven novels are about mastery, about excesses of power, force, and authority in arenas small and large:

21465-473: The theme of technoculture and hyperreality. For example, in Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut , the character Dwayne Hoover becomes violent when he's convinced that everyone else in the world is a robot and he is the only human. This theme is likewise present in the satirical dystopian science-fiction tabletop role-playing game Paranoia . Dubbed maximalism by some critics, and overlapping with

21624-719: The threshold the twenty-first." . Ercolino singled out seven novels for particular attention: Gravity's Rainbow , Infinite Jest , Underworld , White Teeth , The Corrections , 2666 , and 2005 dopo Cristo by Babette Factory. Tom LeClair had previously coined the term systems novel in his 1987 book In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel , exploring the concept further in his 1989 book, The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction . Having introduced

21783-518: The translator of a "chrononaut's" handed down Homeric Greek science fiction epic, the Astronautilia . Other postmodern examples of poioumena include Samuel Beckett 's trilogy ( Molloy , Malone Dies and The Unnamable ); Doris Lessing 's The Golden Notebook ; John Fowles 's Mantissa ; William Golding 's The Paper Men ; Gilbert Sorrentino 's Mulligan Stew ; and S. D. Chrostowska 's Permission . Linda Hutcheon coined

21942-461: The truth. David Foster Wallace in The Pale King writes that the copyright page claims it is fiction only for legal purposes, and that everything within the novel is non-fiction. He employs a character in the novel named David Foster Wallace. Giannina Braschi also has a namesake character and uses metafiction and pastiche in her novels Yo-Yo Boing! and United States of Banana about

22101-421: The way the novel seeks to represent both actual historical events from World War II while, at the same time, problematizes the very notion of doing exactly that. Temporal distortion is a common technique in modernist fiction: fragmentation and nonlinear narratives are central features in both modern and postmodern literature. Temporal distortion in postmodern fiction is used in a variety of ways, often for

22260-553: The well-known postmodern novels deal with World War II , one of the most famous of which being Joseph Heller 's Catch-22 . Heller claimed his novel and many of the other American novels of the time had more to do with the state of the country after the war: The antiwar and anti government feelings in the book belong to the period following World War II: the Korean War , the cold war of the 1950s. A general disintegration of belief took place then, and it affected Catch-22 in that

22419-406: The wheelchairs). Only one miner's son ever (disgracefully) failed to jump—Bernard Wayne, who may be related to E.T.A.'s John Wayne. Québécoise Avril's liaisons with John Wayne, and with A.F.R.'s Guillaume DuPlessis and Luria Perec, suggest that Avril may have ties to the A.F.R. as well. There is also evidence linking E.T.A. prorector Thierry Poutrincourt to the group. These characters cross between

22578-574: The world around it." Literary minimalism can be characterized as a focus on a surface description where readers are expected to take an active role in the creation of a story. The characters in minimalist stories and novels tend to be unexceptional. Generally, the short stories are "slice of life" stories. Minimalism, the opposite of maximalism , is a representation of only the most basic and necessary pieces, specific by economy with words. Minimalist authors hesitate to use adjectives, adverbs, or meaningless details. Instead of providing every minute detail,

22737-399: The world is another recurring postmodern theme. For the postmodernist, no ordering is extremely dependent upon the subject, so paranoia often straddles the line between delusion and brilliant insight. Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 , long-considered a prototype of postmodern literature, presents a situation which may be "coincidence or conspiracy – or a cruel joke". This often coincides with

22896-691: The writers Don DeLillo , Zadie Smith , George Saunders , Mark Costello, Donald Antrim , and Jonathan Franzen . In March 2010, it was announced that Wallace's personal papers and archives—drafts of books, stories, essays, poems, letters, and research, including the handwritten notes for Infinite Jest —had been purchased by the University of Texas at Austin . They are held at that university's Harry Ransom Center . Since 2011, Loyola University New Orleans has offered English seminar courses on Wallace. Similar courses have also been taught at Harvard University . The first David Foster Wallace Conference

23055-650: The year 2000, A. O. Scott wrote of Infinite Jest , "[T]he novel's Pynchonesque elements...feel rather willed and secondhand. They are impressive in the manner of a precocious child's performance at a dinner party, and, in the same way, ultimately irritating: they seem motivated, mostly, by a desire to show off." Some critics have since qualified their initial stances. In 2008, A. O. Scott called Infinite Jest an "enormous, zeitgeist-gobbling novel that set his generation's benchmark for literary ambition" and Wallace "the best mind of his generation". James Wood has said that he regrets his negative review: "I wish I'd slowed down

23214-524: Was adapted as a play by artist Andy Holden for a two-night run at the ICA in London. The short story "Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko", from Brief Interviews with Hideous Men , was adapted by composer Eric Moe into a 50-minute operatic piece, to be performed with accompanying video projections. The piece was described as having "subversively inscribed classical music into pop culture". Infinite Jest

23373-478: Was believed to be a severe interaction of the medication with the food he had eaten one day at a restaurant, and in June 2007, on his doctor's advice, he stopped taking phenelzine , his primary antidepressant drug. His depression recurred, and he tried other treatments, including electroconvulsive therapy . Eventually he went back on phenelzine but found it ineffective. On September 12, 2008, at age 46, Wallace wrote

23532-545: Was born in Ithaca, New York , to Sally Jean Wallace ( née Foster) and James Donald Wallace . The family moved to Champaign-Urbana, Illinois , where he was raised along with his younger sister, Amy Wallace-Havens. His father was a philosophy professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign . His mother was an English professor at Parkland College , a community college in Champaign, which recognized her work with

23691-735: Was cited by Time magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005. His posthumous novel, The Pale King (2011), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2012. The Los Angeles Times ' s David Ulin called Wallace "one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last twenty years". Wallace grew up in Illinois and attended Amherst College . He taught English at Emerson College , Illinois State University , and Pomona College . After struggling with depression for many years, he died by suicide in 2008, at age 46. David Foster Wallace

23850-1107: Was hosted by the Illinois State University Department of English in May 2014; the second was held in May 2015. In January 2017, the International David Foster Wallace Society and the Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies were launched. Among the writers who have cited Wallace as an influence are Dave Eggers , Jonathan Franzen , Rivka Galchen , Matthew Gallaway , David Gordon , John Green , Porochista Khakpour , George Saunders , Michael Schur , Zadie Smith , Darin Strauss , Deb Olin Unferth , Elizabeth Wurtzel , and Charles Yu . A feature-length film adaptation of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men , directed by John Krasinski with an ensemble cast,

24009-417: Was in the development of collage, specifically collages using elements from advertisement or illustrations from popular novels (the collages of Max Ernst , for example). Artists associated with Surrealism , which developed from Dadaism, continued experimentations with chance and parody while celebrating the flow of the subconscious mind. André Breton , the founder of Surrealism, suggested that automatism and

24168-400: Was not until the 1980s that the term "postmodern" caught on as the label for this style of writing. A new generation of writers—such as David Foster Wallace , William T. Vollmann , Dave Eggers , Michael Chabon , Zadie Smith , Chuck Palahniuk , Jennifer Egan , Neil Gaiman , Carole Maso , Richard Powers , Jonathan Lethem —and publications such as McSweeney's , The Believer , and

24327-508: Was performed once as a stage play by Germany's experimental theater Hebbel am Ufer . The play was staged in various locations throughout Berlin , and the action took place over a 24-hour period. "Good Old Neon", from Oblivion: Stories , was adapted and performed by Ian Forester at the 2011 Hollywood Fringe Festival , produced by the Los Angeles independent theater company Needtheater. The song "Surrounded by Heads and Bodies", from

24486-481: Was released in 2009 and premiered at the Sundance Film Festival . The 19th episode of the 23rd season of The Simpsons , " A Totally Fun Thing That Bart Will Never Do Again " (2012), is loosely based on Wallace's essay "Shipping Out" from his 1997 collection, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again . The Simpson family takes a cruise, and Wallace appears in the background of a scene, wearing

24645-492: Was released in a box with no binding so that readers could assemble it however they chose. Metafiction is essentially writing about writing or "foregrounding the apparatus", as is typical of deconstructionist approaches, making the artificiality of art or the fictionality of fiction apparent to the reader and generally disregards the necessity for "willing suspension of disbelief". For example, postmodern sensibility and metafiction dictate that works of parody should parody

24804-497: Was repeatedly hospitalized for psychiatric care. In 1989, he spent four weeks at McLean Hospital —a psychiatric institute in Belmont, Massachusetts , affiliated with Harvard Medical School—where he completed a drug and alcohol detoxification program. He later said his time there changed his life. Dogs were important to Wallace, and he spoke of opening a shelter for stray canines. According to his friend Jonathan Franzen , he "had

24963-545: Was the youth of America during the materialistic 1950s; Jack Kerouac , who coined the term, developed ideas of automatism into what he called "spontaneous prose" to create a maximalistic, multi-novel epic called the Duluoz Legend in the mold of Marcel Proust 's In Search of Lost Time . More broadly, "Beat Generation" often includes several groups of post-war American writers from the Black Mountain poets ,

25122-485: Was using 97 percent of me, whereas philosophy was using 50 percent." Wallace completed a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing at the University of Arizona in 1987. He moved to Massachusetts to attend graduate school in philosophy at Harvard University , but soon left the program. In 2002, Wallace met the painter Karen L. Green , whom he married on December 27, 2004. Wallace struggled with depression, alcoholism, drug addiction, and suicidal tendencies, and

25281-456: Was writing V. , and Kurt Vonnegut was writing Cat's Cradle . I don't think any one of us even knew any of the others. Certainly I didn't know them. Whatever forces were at work shaping a trend in art were affecting not just me, but all of us. The feelings of helplessness and persecution in Catch-22 are very strong in Cat's Cradle . In his Reflections on 'The Name of the Rose ' ,

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