background preloader

David Foster Wallace

Facebook Twitter

Remembering Aaron Swartz: David Foster Wallace on the Meaning of Life. By Maria Popova “Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.” This past weekend, I attended the heartbreaking memorial for open-access activist Aaron Swartz, who for the past two years had been relentlessly and unscrupulously prosecuted for making academic journal articles freely available online and who had taken his own life a week prior.

A speaker at the service read a piece by one of Aaron’s personal heroes, David Foster Wallace — an excerpt from Wallace’s famous Kenyon College commencement address, the only public talk he ever gave on his views of life, which was eventually adapted into a slim book titled This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life (public library). If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough.

Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Donating = Loving. David Foster Wallace: Portrait Of An Infinitely Limited Mind - By Ramon Glazov. From The eXiled’s Australasia Correspondent PERTH, AUSTRALIA–You have to give David Foster Wallace some credit – he was better at making his fans bash themselves than any other writer of the Pynchon school. His magnum opus, Infinite Jest, is a 1000-page novel full of intestinally-shaped sentences and fine-print notes on calculus, organic chemistry and VCR programming. Normally, when a book like that comes out, people realise its purpose right away: terrorising B.A. students into meek submission.

Wallace, however, found a very shrewd way to counter this by pretending that his work was really “a late-night conversation with really good friends, when the bullshit stops and the masks come off.” So instead of menacing the reader in the old Joycean way, Wallace chums it up whenever the technical stuff appears, acting like he really doesn’t mean to discourage anyone. Swapping lecture theatre dread for tutorial group paternalism – that’s the aesthetic in a nutshell. So far, it’s worked well. Six Things You Didn't Know About David Foster Wallace | Culture News. David Foster Wallace et la folie de l'ennui. Il semble qu'une des marques les plus éloquentes de notre angoisse technologique, ce soit, avant tout, que l'on devienne nostalgiques de l'ennui. J'ai des souvenirs d'ennui de jeunesse aussi vifs et douloureux que ceux qui me viennent quand je me rappelle de graves blessures sportives, et pourtant, quand je lis certaines études récentes affirmant que le cerveau a besoin d'ennui, ou que les enfants aujourd'hui ne s'ennuient pas assez, la première idée qui me vient à l'esprit est: béni soit l'ennui.

(La seconde est: va voir tes mails.) Et je ne suis pas le seul. Un petit nombre de recherches pro-ennui ont inspiré un déferlement de passion pro-ennui. publicité D'un côté, défendre l'ennui pourrait sembler sévère et sans-cœur, un peu comme une mère, née pendant la Grande Dépression, qui perdrait patience face aux jérémiades de ses enfants. Ennui fécond Le Voyageur au-dessus de la mer de nuages du peintre romantique Caspar David Friedrich License CC via Wikipedia. Vertus neurologiques de l'ennui. Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace | Les livres que je lis : le blog de Phil. David Foster Wallace. Genre : Littérature étrangère date de naissance :21 Février 1962 date de décès :12 Septembre 2008 Biographie David Foster Wallace S’il compte parmi les auteurs les plus importants de sa génération, David Foster Wallace est surtout connu pour 'Infinite Jest', un roman à l'humour décalé de plus de mille pages sur la culture américaine et ses excès.

C'est à l'écriture de nouvelles que ce professeur d'anglais consacre principalement son talent. Trois recueils, 'Girl with a Curious Hair', 'Brief Interviews with Hideous Men', 'Oblivion' sont ainsi publiés entre 1989 et 2004 et reçoivent un accueil très enthousiaste de la critique et du public. La Fondation MacArthur lui accorde d’ailleurs une bourse pour l'ensemble de son oeuvre en 1997. L'auteur de 'The Broom of the System' se distingue pour l'audace de son écriture, qui allie un style méticuleux et un refus de la narration linéaire, mais aussi pour le regard acerbe et ironique qu'il porte sur la société. › Signaler une erreur sur la fiche.

The Internet Can't Hate David Foster Wallace Because He Is the Internet. Oh how the mighty fall and rise up again on the internet. David Foster Wallace was once a mildly controversial figure in the literary world; much less so ever since his suicide has transformed him into an artists’ martyr. Wallace has been lionized now, status cemented as the Voice of a Generation and a definitive literary light. Rightfully so, imho. At least, few other writers managed to engender such a distinctive style or have been more thoroughly emulated — especially online, where sarcasm and justifiably meandering prose are the norm. And the internet, acting as it can as that broad reflector of the collective cultural opinion, is currently safeguarding his legacy. Its taste-making gatekeepers — not only editorial sites like Slate, Salon, the Atlantic, but entire social platforms like Reddit, Twitter, and Buzzfeed — all play their part in upholding the digitized aura of reverence that surrounds DFW.

Reading D.T. 6. The Great American Hack: David Foster Wallace and Aaron Swartz. I just finished Infinite Jest. Like anyone who's spent months reading a 1,008-page book, particularly this one, I'm at a loss. It's sprawling, and by this point, all the important details from the novel's opening pages are teetering on the foggy edges of my memory. I want to throw it across the room—out of desperation, or passionate love, or both. Instead I pick it up and begin it all over again, this time humbled. A student. But I'm lonely—everyone else I know read this book ten years ago—so I take to Google. "What happens in Infinite Jest??? " I'm relieved. From beyond the grave, it was Aaron Swartz who was walking me through Infinite Jest. In this private denouement, I'm immediately struck by the resonances between this monumental, insane novel and the man who hipped me to its subtext.

For those of you who've never cracked its spine, the plot of Infinite Jest revolves around a fatally compelling film, "the Entertainment. " A page from Foster Wallace's dictionary; Aaron Swartz's laptop. David Foster Wallace. Un article de Wikipédia, l'encyclopédie libre. Pour les articles homonymes, voir Wallace. David Foster Wallace David Foster Wallace en 2006 Œuvres principales Biographie[modifier | modifier le code] Il réussit de brillantes études au Amherst College dans l'État du Massachusetts couronnées par une thèse de philosophie en 1985, sur la logique modale et les mathématiques[1].

Il obtient ensuite un Master of Fine Arts (MFA) en creative writing à l'Université d'Arizona en 1987. En 2002, il s'installe en Californie et enseigne au Pomona College à Claremont et épouse Karen L. Regards sur l'œuvre[modifier | modifier le code] David Foster Wallace a écrit des textes de fiction marqués par l'ironie et l'humour et la volonté de rompre la linéarité narrative par exemple par l'emploi de fréquentes notes de bas de page, en mêlant abréviations et mots anciens, ce qui donne à sa prose un aspect que l'on a qualifié de « labyrinthique »[3]. Bibliographie[modifier | modifier le code]