There is an inherent risk in studying contemporary fiction. Serious questions form around issues of an author's longevity and legacy, a work's merit and its endurance for later scholarship, and the varieties of current critical reception and methodology against the shifts to come. The attendant difficulty of assessing and analyzing a work before an industry of critical reception has formed also presents challenges. David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest ( 1996) represents these challenges, and much more; it is at once an encyclopedic novel of 1079 pages, full of both liberal arts and scientific erudition, and an encomium to an apocalyptic end of late millennial American culture. The novel is highly allegorical and operates with three crucial subtexts, in addition to the standard diegetic narrative. In this study, I present three different, though not mutually exclusive, interpretations of this novel, a novel that has presented interpretive difficulties to scholars of contemporary fiction. In Part One, I survey and compare Wallace's aesthetic with the radical, yet self-contained, aesthetic of the poet, G.M. Hopkins; Part Two examines the integral concept of mediation and explores the subtext of the return of the dead author-the novel operates, in part, as a rejoinder to the death-of-the-author critical impasse; Part Three is primarily comparative and analyzes Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov (1880). Wallace has rewritten (or reimagined) Dostoevsky's novel and translated it into a contemporary context and idiom as a remedy for postmodern American solipsism. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This dissertation is about the ways David Foster Wallace's writing expresses Buddhist philosophy. Because Buddhism is a vast subject, sometimes I conflate several traditional "Buddhisms" into a common-denominator form, while other times I investigate Wallace's work through Zen Buddhism specifically. By close-reading his work in chronological order--starting with The Broom of the System, Girl With Curious Hair, "The Empty Plenum," Infinite Jest, "Roger Federer as Religious Experience," "The Suffering Channel," and The Pale King--I analyze the ways in which Wallace's writing focused on questions of the self-awareness of linguistic expression, the contemporary causes of addiction and suffering and their implied remedy, the ethical and moral implications of living out of self-consciousness, the principles of mutual causality, "co-arising" and ecological well-being, and the discernment of multiple forms of awareness, all of which are foundational concerns shared with Buddhist philosophy. / text

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Illinois State University, 2005. / Title from title page screen, viewed April 10, 2007. Dissertation Committee: Ron Strickland (chair), Chris Breu, Hilary Justice. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 166-183) and abstract. Also available in print.

Loneliness, unhappiness, and discord pervade David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest. Parental neglect and abuse, drug and alcohol addiction, and obsession with entertainment all work to increase characters’ narcissism and self-absorption. This increased narcissism prevents characters from developing meaningful relationships, and this absence of meaningful relationships contributes to the feeling of sadness that plagues the Organization of North American Nations. Rather than confronting reality and working to overcome their sadness by attempting to form meaningful relationships, characters instead seek to escape this sadness through the various fantasies provided by drug-use and entertainment. These fantasies only work to exacerbate characters’ self-absorption and narcissism which consequently increases their unhappiness. Certain characters are able to break free of these narcissistic impulses by turning outwards to form meaningful relationships. As these characters break free of the “cage of the self” (777), they experience a sense of meaning and happiness that other characters are without. / iv, 114 leaves ; 29 cm

Thesis (Ph.D.)--McMaster University, 2003. / Advisor: John Ferns. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 232-241). Also available via World Wide Web.

Throughout the course of this thesis, I argue that the prose of David Foster Wallace, specifically his posthumously published novel The Pale King, inhabits a middle ground between universal sincerity and the particularized authenticity of postmodern irony. I examine Lionel Trilling's definitions of sincerity and authenticity before moving toward an examination of the diverging critical response to Wallace's work, which, I argue, suggests that because so many critics have read his work as either inherently sincere or inherently authentic, his work inhabits a communal middle ground somewhere in between. To explain, I analyze Wallace's so-called manifesto of sincerity, "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction," as well as other instances in interviews and conversations to develop a clearer understanding of what this middle ground consists of. Further, I analyze two passages in The Pale King in which characters seek to communicate moments of profound revelation. Though these characters finally fail to truly communicate these revelations, I argue that it is the communication itself that allows both communicator and listener, and thus both reader and writer, to experience a moment of, as Wallace puts it in The Pale King, "value for both sides, both people in the relation" (227). / Graduation date: 2012

My dissertation looks at the connections between Lacan’s four discourses and the sexuation graph in order to claim that sexuation is discursive and that, as Lacan presents it with the phallus as its quilting point, the sexuation graph is a narrative based on patriarchal hegemony, which is one of many possible narratives. I argue that through the hysteric’s discourse and a removal of the phallus as the Symbolic-Imaginary quilting point, we can begin to formulate new narratives of sexuated subjectivities. The textual objects I use for this project are literary and filmic works where women are the central topic or figure, and the works are all created and developed by men. Following Kristeva’s focus on the semiotic, in particular men’s avant-garde writing, I choose these works as illustrations of the ways in which the depiction of women has shifted in the wake of at least half a century of feminist and queer scholarship and activism. Grounded in Lacan’s claim that “Woman does not exist,” I explicate Woman as metaphor as an Imaginary construction of masculinist logic in order to develop a theory of Woman as metonymy that collapses the oppressive, Imaginary constructions and proliferations of Woman. Finally, I read closely Lacan’s sexuation graph, specifically turning it sideways and replacing the phallus with the general, empty master signifier to show the ways in which we can construct new meanings of subjectivity.

This essay presents a conceptual analysis of my piece Unavoidably Sentimental for Large Ensemble. Specifically, the paper traces the roots of the musical thinking in the piece to a notion of Sincerity that emerges from David Foster Wallace’s books and essays. The term New Sincerity, coined by Adam Kelly, is deployed to consider what a post-postmodern Sincerity could sound like in contemporary music. The paper provides general background to the literary discourse around the concept of New Sincerity as an extension of Lionel Trilling’s formalization of Sincerity and Authenticity. It suggests some examples of how a renewed sense of Sincerity could incarnate in contemporary music. As a background for the analysis of Unavoidably Sentimental itself, the paper provides background to my prior engagement with concepts like irony and authenticity in music. Unavoidably Sentimental is analyzed as a linear process, in which the piece tries to emerge out of a net of self-aware referential musical objects into the creation of sonic states of unmediated human communication between the musicians and the audience. I present different musical strategies in which the piece confronts the limitations of human communication through music, contextualized with reference to the portrayal of communication in Wallace’s writings.

My dissertation looks at the connections between Lacan’s four discourses and the sexuation graph in order to claim that sexuation is discursive and that, as Lacan presents it with the phallus as its quilting point, the sexuation graph is a narrative based on patriarchal hegemony, which is one of many possible narratives. I argue that through the hysteric’s discourse and a removal of the phallus as the Symbolic-Imaginary quilting point, we can begin to formulate new narratives of sexuated subjectivities. The textual objects I use for this project are literary and filmic works where women are the central topic or figure, and the works are all created and developed by men. Following Kristeva’s focus on the semiotic, in particular men’s avant-garde writing, I choose these works as illustrations of the ways in which the depiction of women has shifted in the wake of at least half a century of feminist and queer scholarship and activism. Grounded in Lacan’s claim that “Woman does not exist,” I explicate Woman as metaphor as an Imaginary construction of masculinist logic in order to develop a theory of Woman as metonymy that collapses the oppressive, Imaginary constructions and proliferations of Woman. Finally, I read closely Lacan’s sexuation graph, specifically turning it sideways and replacing the phallus with the general, empty master signifier to show the ways in which we can construct new meanings of subjectivity.

Rhetorics of identification traditionally address two questions: how does rhetoric work, who or what is involved in rhetorical relations, and how do these relations unfold and proceed, and how can and should we conduct ourselves in light of this state of things, what modes of engagement and response do we have available? Rhetoricians have drawn substantially on Kenneth Burke’s work on symbolic action in answering these questions, but this emphasis on the symbolic does not exhaust the range and nature of rhetorical relations, and other modes of relationality thus warrant our attention. My work aims to consider how our understanding of identification shifts when we move beyond the symbolic frame, when we attend to rhetorical relations without grounding our inquiry in considerations of representation, interpretation, understanding, dialectics, and epistemology. Drawing on conversations in nonrational rhetorics, object-oriented ontology, postmodernism and postmodern literature, digital rhetorics, writing studies, and video game studies, I attend to the material, affective, and singular nature of rhetorical relations. I also consider the modes of engagement this understanding of identification makes available with reference to writing pedagogy and the work of authors Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace. / text