The Wallace Effect: David Foster Wallace and the Contemporary Literary Imagination
Marshall Boswell, "The Wallace Effect: David Foster Wallace and the Contemporary Literary Imagination "
English | ISBN: 1501344943 | 2019 | 184 pages | EPUB, PDF | 564 KB + 7 MB
English | ISBN: 1501344943 | 2019 | 184 pages | EPUB, PDF | 564 KB + 7 MB
The Wallace Effect explores David Foster Wallace's contested space at the forefront of 21st-century American fiction. Pioneering Wallace scholar Marshall Boswell does this by illuminating “The Wallace Effect”-the aura of literary competition that Wallace routinely summoned in his fiction and non-fiction and that continues to inform the reception of his work by his contemporaries.
A frankly combative writer, Wallace openly challenged his artistic predecessors as he sought to establish himself as the leading literary figure of the post-postmodern turn. Boswell challenges this portrait in two ways. First, he examines novels by Wallace's literary patriarchs and contemporaries that introduce innovations on traditional metafiction that Wallace would later claim as his own. Second, he explores four novels published after Wallace's ascendency that attempt to demythologize Wallace's persona and his literary preeminence.