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David Foster Wallace’s 1996 novel Infinite Jest presents a version of postmodern myth that is mediated through film, television, and other commercial entertainments. This media landscape is hostile, grotesque, and self-referencing. Its recursivity corrupts the chain of narrativization that transforms reality into history into myth. In the novel, the newly formed Organization of North American Nations coopts the preexisting culture industry in order to create a new, updated mythos and identity in service of its nationhood. The myths that it manages to produce are bizarre, non-linear, and illegible. This myth-making machine, using (fictional) history as its source material, seems unable to make meaningful or unifying narratives about the North American people of Infinite Jest. This is because the nascent government coopts the culture industry as the medium for myth, which leads the North American people to understand the culture industry itself to be their new mythic inheritance. This situation resembles Francis Fukuyama’s proposed End of History. An important characteristic of post-History is the loss of art. Individuals in this post-Historical position are at risk of losing the ability to describe their historical context or understand their identity as one among a collective of people. I argue that this landscape can be described through abjection, as defined by Julia Kristeva and elaborated by N. Katherine Hayles. I additionally use Roland Barthes’ definition of myth, Marshall McLuhan’s definition of media, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s critique of the culture industry, and Mikhail Bakhtin’s formalist method to aid my analysis of mythic entertainments that appear in the novel, which I term intratexts.

nonPeerReviewed

Entertainment and mass media are proven to be an addictive aspect of our everyday lives. David Foster Wallace was very concerned with media’s dangerous potential, and his 1996 novel Infinite Jest explores this along with other aspects of addiction in detail. The aim of this thesis is to investigate how entertainment addiction is represented in David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest for the purpose of understanding how addiction is woven into its narrative and form, and whether or not it stands above the postmodern aura of irony it engages with and critiques., https://www.ester.ee/record=b5374357*est

This is the peer-reviewed submission version of the essay, which focuses on the role that digital communication platforms can play in teaching and engaging with Wallace's work.

This review essay approaches Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller's Thinking Literature across Continents (2016) from a set of questions about what it means to read in the age of hyperarchival accumulation. Written against the background of events in the United States and elsewhere during the fall of 2017, the essay tracks and assesses Ghosh and Miller's differing methods for approaching literary study in the twenty-first century: undiscriminating catholicity and rhetorical reading, respectively. Through emblematic readings of David Foster Wallace's novel The Pale King (2011), the videogame Katamari Damacy (2004), and Amy Hungerford's Making Literature Now (2016), this essay argues that Thinking Literature across Continents self-reflexively models and performs the interested, situated reading practices necessary for continuing the never-ending project of encountering, sharing, accounting for, learning from, and contending with others and their divergent readings, practices that, though many may have lost sight of them today, are fundamental to the project of democracy itself.

Orientador : Prof. Dr. Caetano Waldrigues Galindo Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal do Paraná, Setor de Ciências Humanas, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Letras. Defesa: Curitiba, 27/06/2016 Inclui referências : f. 151-155 Resumo: Em sua produção ficcional e não ficcional, o escritor contemporâneo norte-americano David Foster Wallace aborda aspectos que questionam valores tomados como certos pela estética tradicional, tais como identidade, comunidade e nação. O objetivo desse projeto é analisar como uma da obras mais importantes desse escritor representa e figura uma versão de um mundo distópico carnavalizado que modifica a relação de alteridade existente entre o eu e o outro, dentro do universo literário. Para além da relação apresentada no limite da obra literária, este trabalho pretende analisar essa mesma relação de alteridade no espaço fora da obra. Tendo como ponto de partida o projeto literário do próprio escritor, de engajamento do leitor, outro dos objetivos dessa dissertação é promover uma breve discussão sobre a questão do novo movimento literário americano que alguns chamam de pós pós-modernidade (BURN, 2012). Os conceitos de carnavalização e alteridade, abertos e cambiantes, fogem de definições estritas, possibilitando sua discussão de modo a construirmos seu significado na própria obra. Dessa forma, propõe-se a análise, partindo de uma perspectiva dialógica e alteritária, do universo e das personagens representadas no romance Graça Infinita (2014, 1ª ed. 1996), considerado como a obra mais importante em toda a produção de David Foster Wallace. Concebendo a literatura como um catalisador de questões filosóficas e culturais, partiremos das reflexões da filosofia do teórico russo Mikhail Bakhtin, mais especificamente de seus pensamentos a respeito do romance, especialmente no que concerne às obras A Cultura Popular na Idade Média e no Renascimento (2013, 1ª ed. 1965) e Problemas da Poética de Dostoiévski (1981, 1ª ed. 1929). Entendendo o discurso como algo ideológico, que se desenvolve na linha da história trazendo consigo marcas de uma memória, encontramos nele, especialmente no que diz respeito ao discurso narrativo, a possibilidade de vislumbrar de que maneira a obra literária desvela aspectos da realidade. Se o romancista figura uma imagem do homem na obra literária, é através dessa representação que podemos enxergar de que forma o sujeito vê a si próprio e o mundo em que vive. Palavras-chave: David Foster Wallace, Mikhail Bakhtin, alteridade, liberdade. Abstract: In his fictional and non-fictional production, contemporary American writer David Foster Wallace approaches aspects that question values taken for granted by traditional aesthetics, such as identity, community and nation. The goal of this project is to analyze how one of Wallace's most important works represents and conjures up a carnivalesque dystopic world and how this carnivalesque aspect modifies the relation of alterity existent between the "I" and the "Other" inside this literary universe. Going beyond the relationship existent inside the limits of the literary work, this dissertation aims to analyze the same relation of alterity in the setting that surrounds the novel. Having for a starting point the author's own literary project of engaging the reader, another object of this dissertation is to promote a brief discussion about the new literary movement in America that some critics call post postmodernism (BURN, 2012). The concepts of carnivalesque and alterity, open and changeable, escape any strict definitions allowing a discussion in order to build their meaning inside the novel itself. Therefore, I propose an analysis, from a dialogic perspective, of the universe and characters presented in Infinite Jest, considered the most important work in all of Wallace's production. Regarding literature as a catalyst of philosophical and cultural questions, we will base our discussions in the thoughts and philosophy of Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, particularly the works: Rabelais and his World and Problems of Dostoyevsky's Poetics. Understanding discourse as something ideological in its nature, something that develops itself in the course of history, bringing with it the traces of a memory, when it comes to narrative discourse, there is a possibility to catch a glimpse of the way in which the literary work unveils aspects of reality. If novelists present an image of men in their novel, it is by looking at that image that we can observe how individuals see themselves and the world they live in. Keywords: David Foster Wallace, Mikhail Bakhtin, alterity, liberty.