David Foster Wallace: Fiction and Form

In David Foster Wallace: Fiction and Form, David Hering analyses the structures of David Foster Wallace's fiction, from his debut The Broom of the System to his final unfinished novel The Pale King. Incorporating extensive analysis of Wallace's drafts, notes and letters, and taking account of the rapidly expanding field of Wallace scholarship, this book argues that the form of Wallace's fiction is always inextricably bound up within an ongoing conflict between the monologic and the dialogic, one strongly connected with Wallace's sense of his own authorial presence and identity in the work.

Hering suggests that this conflict occurs at the level of both subject and composition, analysing the importance of a number of provocative structural and critical contexts - ghostliness, institutionality, reflection - to the fiction while describing how this argument is also visible within the development of Wallace's manuscripts, comparing early drafts with published material to offer a career-long framework of the construction of Wallace's fiction. The final chapter offers an unprecedentedly detailed analysis of the troubled, decade-long construction of the work that became The Pale King.

Autorentext

David Hering is Lecturer in English at the University of Liverpool, UK.

Inhalt

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter 1 Vocality "A Flickering Hand, Dead and Cold": Reading Wallace's Ghosts

Chapter 2 Spatiality "In the Middle of the Middle of Nowhere": Regionalism and Institutions

Chapter 3 Visuality "Seeing by Mirror-Light": Wallace on Reflection

Chapter 4 Finality "Not Even Close to Complete": The Many Forms of The Pale King

Works Cited