About This guide
This guide provides information about how to find books, articles, and other resources related to Infinite Jest and other writings you will be reading in this class.
Books
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Infinite Jest by Infinite Jest is the name of a movie said to be so entertaining that anyone who watches it loses all desire to do anything but watch it. People die happily, viewing it in endless repetition. The novel Infinite Jest is the story of this addictive entertainment, and in particular how it affects a Boston halfway house for recovering addicts and a nearby tennis academy, whose students have many budding addictions of their own. As the novel unfolds, various individuals, organizations, and governments vie to obtain the master copy of Infinite Jest for their own ends, and the denizens of the tennis school and the halfway house are caught up in increasingly desperate efforts to control the movie - as is a cast including burglars, transvestite muggers, scam artists, medical professionals, pro football stars, bookies, drug addicts both active and recovering, film students, political assassins, and one of the most endearingly messed-up families ever captured in a novel. On this outrageous frame hangs an exploration of,essential questions about what entertainment is, and why it has come to so dominate our lives; about how our desire for entertainment interacts with our need to connect with other humans; and about what the pleasures we choose say about who we are. Equal parts philosophical quest and screwball comedy, Infinite Jest bends every rule of fiction without sacrificing for a moment its own entertainment value. The huge cast and multilevel narrative serve a story that accelerates to a breathtaking, heartbreaking, unforgettable conclusion. It is an exuberant, uniquely American exploration of the passions that make us human - and one of those rare books that renew the very idea of what a novelcan do.Location: Mugar Stacks PS3573 A425635 I54 1996Publication Date: 1996 -
Infinite Jest: a Reader's Guide by This is part of a new series of guides to contemporary novels. The aim of the series is to give readers accessible and informative introductions to some of the most popular, most acclaimed and most influential novels of recent years - from ‘The Remains of the Day' to ‘White Teeth'. A team of contemporary fiction scholars from both sides of the Atlantic has been assembled to provide a thorough and readable analysis of each of the novels in question.Location: Mugar Stacks PS3573 A425635 I5433 2003Publication Date: 2003 -
The Legacy of David Foster Wallace by aConsidered by many to be the greatest writer of his generation, David Foster Wallace was at the height of his creative powers when he committed suicide in 2008. In a sweeping portrait of WallaceOCOs writing and thought and as a measure of his importance in literary history, "The Legacy of David Foster Wallace "gathers cutting-edge, field-defining scholarship by critics alongside remembrances by many of his writer friends, who include some of the worldOCOs most influential authors. aIn this elegant volume, literary critics scrutinize the existing Wallace scholarship and at the same time pioneer new ways of understanding WallaceOCOs fiction and journalism. In critical essays exploring a variety of topicsOCoincluding WallaceOCOs relationship to American literary history, his place in literary journalism, his complicated relationship to his postmodernist predecessors, the formal difficulties of his 1996 magnum opus "Infinite Jest," his environmental imagination, and the OC social lifeOCO of his fiction and nonfictionOCocontributors plumb sources as diverse as Amazon.com reader recommendations, professional book reviews, the 2009 "Infinite Summer" project, and the David Foster Wallace archive at the University of TexasOCOs Harry Ransom Center. aThe creative writersOCoincluding Don DeLillo, Jonathan Franzen, George Saunders, Rick Moody, Dave Eggers, and David Lipsky, and WallaceOCOs Little, Brown editor, Michael PietschOCoreflect on the person behind the volumes of fiction and nonfiction created during the authorOCOs too-short life. aAll of the essays, critical and creative alike, are written in an accessible style that does not presume any background in Wallace criticism. Whether the reader is an expert in all things David Foster Wallace, a casual fan of his fiction and nonfiction, or completely new to Wallace, "The Legacy of David Foster Wallace" will reveal the power and innovation that defined his contribution to literary life and to self-understanding. This illuminating volume is destined to shape our understanding of Wallace, his writing, and his place in history. aLocation: Available onlinePublication Date: 2012 -
David Foster Wallace and 'The Long Thing' by Of the twelve books David Foster Wallace published both during his lifetime and posthumously, only three were novels. Nevertheless, Wallace always thought of himself primarily as a novelist. From his college years at Amherst, when he wrote his first novel as part of a creative honors thesis, to his final days, Wallace was buried in a novel project, which he often referred to as "the Long Thing." Meanwhile, the short stories and journalistic assignments he worked on during those years he characterized as "playing hooky from a certain Larger Thing." Wallace was also a specific kind of novelist, devoted to producing a specific kind of novel, namely the omnivorous, culture-consuming "encyclopedic" novel, as described in 1976 by Edward Mendelson in a ground-breaking essay on Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. David Foster Wallace and "The Long Thing" is a state-of-the art guide through Wallace's three major works, including the generation-defining Infinite Jest. These essays provide fresh new readings of each of Wallace's novels as well as thematic essays that trace out patterns and connections across the three works. Most importantly, the collection includes six chapters on Wallace's unfinished novel, The Pale King, which will prove to be foundational for future scholars of this important text.Location: Available OnlinePublication Date: 2014 -
Conversations with David Foster Wallace by Across two decades of intense creativity, David Foster Wallace (1962-2008) crafted a remarkable body of work that ranged from unclassifiable essays, to a book about transfinite mathematics, to vertiginous fictions. Whether through essay volumes (A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, Consider the Lobster), short story collections (Girl with Curious Hair, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Oblivion), or his novels (Infinite Jest, The Broom of the System), the luminous qualities of Wallace's work recalibrated our measures of modern literary achievement. Conversations with David Foster Wallace gathers twenty-two interviews and profiles that trace the arc of Wallace's career, shedding light on his omnivorous talent. Jonathan Franzen has argued that, for Wallace, an interview provided a formal enclosure in which the writer "could safely draw on his enormous native store of kindness and wisdom and expertise." Wallace's interviews create a wormhole in which an author's private theorizing about art spill into the public record. Wallace's best interviews are vital extra-literary documents, in which we catch him thinking aloud about his signature concerns--irony's magnetic hold on contemporary language, the pale last days of postmodernism, the delicate exchange that exists between reader and writer. At the same time, his acute focus moves across MFA programs, his negotiations with religious belief, the role of footnotes in his writing, and his multifaceted conception of his work's architecture. Conversations with David Foster Wallace includes a previously unpublished interview from 2005, and a version of Larry McCaffery's influential Review of Contemporary Fiction interview with Wallace that has been expanded with new material drawn from the original raw transcript.Location: Available OnlinePublication Date: 2012 -
New Media and the Transformation of Postmodern American Literature by How has American literature after postmodernism responded to the digital age' Drawing on insights from contemporary media theory, this is the first book to explore the explosion of new media technologies as an animating context for contemporary American literature. Casey Michael Henry examines the intertwining histories of new media forms since the 1970s and literary postmodernism and its aftermath, from William Gaddis 's J R and Bret Easton Ellis 's American Psycho through to David Foster Wallace 's Infinite Jest. Through these histories, the book charts the ways in which print-based postmodern writing at first resisted new mass media forms and ultimately came to respond to them.Location: Available OnlinePublication Date: 2019 -
Imaginary Films in Literature by Since cinema is a composite language, describing a movie is a complex challenge for critics and writers, and greatly differs from the ancient and successful genre of the ekphrasis, the literary description of a visual work of art. Imaginary Films in Literature deals with a specific and significant case within this broad category: the description of imaginary, non-existent movies - a practice that is more widespread than one might expect, especially in North American postmodern fiction. Along with theoretical contributions, the book includes the analyses of some case studies focusing on the borders between the visual and the literary, intermedial practices of hybridization, the limits of representation, and other related notions such as "memory", "fragmentation", "desire", "genre", "authorship", and "censorship".Location: Available OnlinePublication Date: 2015
