David Foster Wallace - Suicide as a Sort of Present. David Foster Wallace and Rap, Circa 1989. The mid-twenties are a fraught time for the well-educated American male. There beckons the possibility of retreat, toward the warm communal bath that was college; that this can’t be done hasn’t sunk in yet. In the late nineteen-eighties, David Foster Wallace found himself in a confusing situation and he responded confusedly. He had already published “The Broom of the System,” a sensation. His second work of fiction, “Girl with Curious Hair,” he guessed correctly, would not make the same splash.
So he looked backward: he returned to school in the hopes of becoming an academic philosopher, like his dad, and he asked his old Amherst College roommate and best friend, Mark Costello, to rejoin him. Wallace saw this regression as progress. When you research a book, certain comments people make stay with you. The result, available again after many years out of print, was “Signifying Rappers.” This was an adviso Wallace could not have heeded even if he had wanted to. D.T. David Foster Wallace's Kenyon commencement speech video. Our Psychic Living Room - The Common Review.
Why It's Particularly Important to Read David Foster Wallace Two years have now passed since the death of David Foster Wallace in the fall of 2008. His legacy as a writer has been the subject of nonstop debate since the day of his suicide. I’ll cut to the chase: I believe he was, in his own way, a literary genius. Let me explain why. You may have opened Harper’s or Rolling Stone back around the turn of the century and read a really funny essay by a chatty, neurotic writer who had Rain Man–like abilities to recall and describe experiences as diverse as attending the Illinois State Fair, playing tennis during a tornado, and following John McCain’s presidential campaign.
You may have found the essays hilarious, or quite brilliant. But it has given me something to do with my time, and it’s also given me this sort of quixotic sense of purpose, this mission to Tell the People about David Foster Wallace—because the people, being a well-educated and discerning people, deserve to know. The Deaths of a Tax Accountant by Jarrod Dunham. Photograph by Brandi Korte by Jarrod Dunham “Writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin”,[1] Roland Barthes wrote in his 1967 essay “The Death of the Author”.
Barthes, an author himself, was of course not speaking literally. And yet, the literal death of an author – the 2008 suicide of David Foster Wallace – will in the very near future raise certain difficult questions about the tenability of Barthes’ argument. “The Death of the Author” calls for an end to any question of what the author of a given text was trying to do or say. Barthes, of course, was not the first thinker to express such skepticism, nor does “The Death of the Author” represent either a culmination or amalgamation of the various anti-authorial arguments that preceded it. But while anti-authorialism holds an esteemed position in critical theory, its tenets are by no means universally accepted, and even amongst sympathetic audiences they have proven remarkably difficult to implement. Notes: Of Lobsters and Birds by Elias Tezapsidis. By Elias Tezapsidis Freedom: A Novel, by Jonathan Franzen, Picador, 608 pp.
Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace, Back Bay Books, 1104 pp. The maternal figures of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom are antithetical characters. Avril Incandenza, the imperious OCD-ridden mother figure in Infinite Jest, raises insecure children despite her profound love for them. On the contrary, Patty Berglund, the conflicted mother in Freedom, eventually adopts the role of the child herself, but – possibly because of her many insecurities – allows her children to become more self-reliant individuals.
This observation elucidates how the pragmatic differences appearing between DFW and JF as individuals are intertwined with the connection each shares with the primary maternal figure of his novel. I. JF: Ability to Leave JF’s writing centers on domestic experiences woven into themes of larger social dimensions. Manifestation in Fiction DFW: Inability to Leave II. III. IV. David Foster Wallace on Art vs. TV and the Motivation to be Smart. This Is Water: David Foster Wallace on Life. I know why Bret Easton Ellis hates David Foster Wallace. As much of the literary world knows by now, Bret Easton Ellis went off big time against David Foster Wallace the other day on Twitter, driven into a serial, sputtering rage by his reading of D.T. Max’s newly published biography of Wallace, “Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story.” Some would say that Ellis is being exceptionally hostile and ungenerous toward a tragically tormented writer who, having hanged himself, is in no position to defend himself.
Me, I chalk it up to Bret being Bret and am not inclined to be judgmental. But then, I am in the unique position of having published both of these phenomenally talented and radically antithetical writers just as they were starting out, and I think I know some things that underlie Bret Easton Ellis’ volcanic pique. I was a young(ish) editor at Penguin Books in 1985 when I was given the galleys of “Less Than Zero” to read by Simon and Schuster for reprint consideration. In late 1988 I moved from Penguin to W. An Excerpt from "Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace" At the end of 1989, David Foster Wallace was admitted to McLean Hospital, the psychiatric hospital associated with Harvard University, for substance addiction. He was twenty-seven years old and increasingly desperate for help. He had already experienced literary fame with his college novel, “The Broom of the System,” and sunk into obscurity with his postmodern short-story cabinet of wonders, “Girl with Curious Hair” (twenty-two hundred copies sold in hardcover).
His most recent stop, as a graduate student in philosophy at Harvard, had lasted only a few weeks. His private life was hardly less uneven. The four weeks Wallace spent at McLean in November 1989 changed his life. Wallace was placed in a facility for alcoholics and depressives, with a large room for twelve-step meetings. The program was meant to shake up the addict, and, with Wallace, it succeeded. It was Wallace’s expectation that he would go back to Harvard after his stay at McLean. Not that things came easily. David Foster Wallace's struggle to surpass Infinite Jest. The writer David Foster Wallace committed suicide on September 12th of last year. His wife, Karen Green, came home to find that he had hanged himself on the patio of their house, in Claremont, California.
For many months, Wallace had been in a deep depression. The condition had first been diagnosed when he was an undergraduate at Amherst College, in the early eighties; ever since, he had taken medication to manage its symptoms. During this time, he produced two long novels, three collections of short stories, two books of essays and reporting, and “Everything and More,” a history of infinity. Wallace’s death was followed by four public memorial services, celebrations of his work in newspapers and magazines, and tributes on the Web. The sadness over Wallace’s death was also connected to a feeling that, for all his outpouring of words, he died with his work incomplete. So Wallace’s project required him to invent a language and a stance of his own. His family was surprised by his return.