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In this study of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, I combine the linguistic and literary theories of renowned scholar Mikhail Bakhtin to create a new lens through which to consider Wallace’s thematic project. Combining Bakhtin’s linguistic theories of dialogic conflict and heteroglossia with his literary theories on the grotesque provides an integrated stylistic methodology that illustrates the connections between Wallace’s use of imagery and style. In view of his use of both grotesque liminal imagery and dialogized heteroglossia, Wallace’s seemingly obsessive use of language is recast as a manifestation of grotesque embodiment that reflects the postmodern mileau in which he writes. I propose that Wallace crafts a series of grotesque stylistic devices that shape his words to match his theme. I propose two particular grotesque stylistic devices: narrative bleed in which the seemingly neutral narrative voice begins to reflect particular character discourses and character-to-character voice bleed in which dialogic conflict between characters is dramatically rendered within the novel.

In this project, I argue that David Foster Wallace's 1996 novel Infinite jest (or IJ) is both about recovering from addiction through humility, and also it produces that humility in some of its readers by making us feel ourselves to be addicts to a certain kind of reading: a reading to find closure, certainty, and resolution. But, in frustrating the desires for closure, certainty, resolution, etc., IJ denies readers the satisfaction of completing the fix. It is precisely this denial that prompts readers to re-read, repeating the structure of addiction--but also destructuring it, by installing habits of reading that pleasure in the failure to close, the uncertainty, the impossibility of resolution--habits which I treat as humility. Following a thread in the performative theory of J.L. Austin, Jacques Derrida, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, I clear space for reconceptualizing the performative utterance through an unusual example of a performative utterance: I take IJ to be the utterance of humility. Drawing on Avital Ronell's "narcoanalysis" in Crack wars, I argue that IJ's performative or substantializing work is in exploiting one kind of habit (addiction) in order to replace it with another (humility). The rhetorical transformation (to humility) effects itself through IJ's performative formation (in the reader) of the humbled habit. This project is a reading of a performative utterance (IJ) that produces a rhetorical effect, which effect is the formation of the habit of humility. / text

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

As a writer popularly known for his fervent self-interrogations and encyclopedic second novel Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace’s most apparent significance in US literary history lies in his explicit response to his postmodern predecessors, such as John Barth and Thomas Pynchon. In his now infamous essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction,” Wallace argued that postmodern authors had over-invested in the literary tools of irony and self-reference to such a degree that they became complicit in the erosion of the same communal principles that broadcast television attacks in its bid for increasing consumer dependency and profit. In search of a way beyond this complicity, Wallace called for a brand of “anti-rebels” who would discard irony for earnest principles and teach us how to resist the temptations of the United States’ consumer culture. This call was heard by literary critics. “E Unibus Pluram” is the center for arguments over Wallace’s fiction, as critics discuss whether that essay expresses the literary project Wallace actually pursued and to what extent it should guide our reading practices. One problem this dissertation identifies in these discussions is an overemphasis on specific devices like irony that Wallace analyzes in “E Unibus Pluram.” Though important for understanding his argument, this overemphasis comes at the expense of our seeing the deeper problem that Wallace identifies in “E Unibus Pluram,” which is the atomization of US culture that is fueled by our addiction to pleasure-based commodities like television. The loss of focus on this central problem has led to confusion in readings of Wallace that fail to see the abiding concerns that he carried from his first work to his last. This dissertation seeks to remedy this problem by reading Wallace’s mature fiction as a developing struggle against the atomization of US culture. In this struggle, Wallace launched a series of increasingly complex narrative strategies for promoting a communal way of life to his readers. This dissertation reads several of these strategies to reveal two developments in Wallace’s thought: his diagnosis of the problems facing US culture as created by an unmitigated individualism and his understanding of the best way to respond to individualism by emphasizing the great importance of social institutions. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that Wallace pictured fictional communities throughout his career as a means of critiquing the atomized space of the contemporary United States. He built these communities to help readers see that there are different ways to occupy the world than those promoted by consumer capitalism, but he also structured his narratives to teach readers how to see and think in the ways he thought necessary for realizing such alternatives. / English

While scholars have analyzed the masculinity crisis portrayed in American fiction, few have focused on postmodernist fiction, few have examined masculinity without using feminist theory, and no articles propose an adequate solution for ending normative masculinity’s dominance. I examine the masculinity crisis as it is portrayed in two postmodernist novels, David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest and Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club. Both novels have male characters that ran the gamut of masculinities, but those that are the most successful at avoiding gender stereotypes (Donald Gately in Infinite Jest, and the narrator in Fight Club) develop a masculinity which incorporates strong, phallic masculinity and nurturing, testicular masculinity, creating a balanced gender. At the same time, both novels examine postmodernist fiction’s future. Post-postmodernist fiction, similar to well-rounded masculinity, seeks to be more emotionally open with the reader while still using irony and innovation for meaningful effects, not just to be clever.

In the 1980s and 1990s, many scientifically cognizant young novelists turned away from the physics-based tropes of entropy and chaos and chose biological concepts of order, complexity, and self-organization as their dominant metaphors. This dissertation focuses on three novels published between 1991 and 1996 that replace the notion of the encyclopedia as a closed system and model new narrative ecologies grounded in the tenets of the emergent science of complex systems. Thus, Richard Powers's The Gold-Bug Variations (1991) explores the marriage of bottom-up self-organizing systems and top-down natural selection through a narrative lens and cautions us against any worldview which does not grasp life as a complex system; Bob Shacochis's Swimming in the Volcano (1993) illustrates how richly complex global behavior emerges from the local interaction of a large number of independent agents; and, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest (1996) enacts a collaborative narrative of distributed causality to investigate reciprocal relationships between the individual and the multiple systems in which he is embedded. Unlike many other contemporary authors, the new encyclopedists do not shun the abundance of information in postmodern culture. Instead, as I demonstrate here, the intricate webs of their complex ecologies emerge as narrative circulates through diverse informational networks. Ecologies of Knowledge argues that these texts inaugurate a new naturalism, demanding a reconciliation between humans and the natural world and advocating an increased understanding of life's interdependent patterns and particularities. Grounded in such an awareness of ecological complexity, these large and demanding books are our survival guides for the twenty-first century. / Department of English

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