3 Ways to Visualize the David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. By Maria Popova What dotted lines have to do with telenovelas, pop culture reverence and analog GPS. David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, a favorite book of many, is the kind of genre-bender that will thwart your mind with its convoluted narrative, plethora of allusions and cultural references, and multilateral connections between the characters. Navigating its maze of relationships and 400 footnotes could drive even the most seasoned literary disentanglers up the reading room wall. So today, we look at three visual efforts to deconstruct the iconic novel. To illuminate the essential points of the novel’s plot, German designer Jonny set out to flowchart the novel’s most essential characters, revealing an amusingly complex ecosystem that’s part Shakespearean play, part Mexican telenovela.
If the characters aren’t enough of a brilliant mess for you, David Foster Wallace adds another layer of confusion with a slew of locations that would send any GPS spinning. Share on Tumblr. Alas, poor Wallace: A Review of Infinite Jest. Aphorism of the Day: Particular people are narrow people precisely because they always know what they like. Accidents, guesses gone wrong, uneaten entrees: these are what make us whole. Aphorism of the Day II: There’s no better punchline than missing the punchline–unless you happen to be the punchline. In a 1997 Charlie Rose interview, when asked about the hundreds of footnotes scattered through Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace claimed that he needed some way to disrupt the linearity of the text short of making it unreadable, that writing requires “some interplay between how difficult you make it for the reader and how seductive.”
This is as true of novels as it is shooting the shit or obligatory familial phone-calls. This is the whole reason why publishers are keen to plaster testimonials on the cover of their books: to milk our authority and social proof biases. Which should be no surprise. The problem is that one can say the same about the Turner Diaries or Mein Kampf. Infinite Jest | Cultural Compass. Approximately 200 books from David Foster Wallace’s library arrived at the Ransom Center with his papers. When the staff unpacked the collection to check its condition, we could see immediately that the library was not simply a supplement to the archive but an essential part of it.
Wallace annotated many of the books heavily: he underlined passages, made extensive comments in the margins, and utilized the front and back inside covers for notes, vocabulary lists, brainstorms, and more. As a reader of Infinite Jest, one book in particular caught my eye: a battered paperback copy of Pam Cook’s edited volume The Cinema Book (New York: Pantheon, 1985). This reference work is heavily used: it lacks both its front and back cover, its spine is held on with two pieces of tape, and the exposed inside cover is inscribed “D.
Infinite Jest is a book about many things, and the mesmerizing power of movies is one of its most dominant themes. Harper's Magazine: Tense Present. A Dictionary of Modern American Usage, by Bryan A. Garner. Oxford University Press, 1998. 723 pages. $35. A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, by H. W. Fowler. The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language, by Steven Pinker. Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, E. Usage and Abusage: A Guide to Good English, by Eric Partridge. Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Philip Gore, ed. Dilige et quod vis fac. "Save up to 50% — (and More)! " Did you know that probing the seamy underbelly of U.S. lexicography reveals ideological strife and controversy and intrigue and nastiness and fervor on a nearly hanging-chad scale?
The occasion for this article is Oxford University Press's semi-recent release of Bryan A. From one perspective, a certain irony attends the publication of any good new book on American usage. I submit that we SNOOTs are just about the last remaining kind of truly elitist nerd. Issues of tradition vs. egalitarianism in U.S. Akbar.marlboro.edu/~jsheehy/kenyon.pdf. Infinite Jest. Today’s Klawchat was heavy on draft questions.
I also have a new draft blog post up on UNC third baseman Colin Moran, and a post up on Wil Myers, Jake Odorizzi, and other Durham and Charlotte prospects. It took just over two weeks, but I finished David Foster Wallace’s sprawling magnum opus Infinite Jest , all 1079 pages of its madness and hysteria. It’s a work of tremendous intelligence, a novel that wants to challenge you to follow its undulations and hairpin turns, and yet a work of great empathy as well with its well-considered meditations on subjects like mental illness or addiction recovery. The plot itself is intricate, looped and non-linear, at times deliberately involuted and interrupted by footnotes that have, unfortunately, become one of the book’s hallmarks.
Why are Quebecois separatists so central to the book? *My favorite is the prank call Hal receives, where another character says, “Mr. I also found Wallace’s vision of the future a distraction from the rest of the book. Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace Wiki : Infinite Jest. Infinite Jest (1996) is a novel written by David Foster Wallace.
The lengthy and complex work takes place in a semi-parodic future version of North America. The novel touches on the topics of tennis; substance addiction and recovery programs; depression; child abuse; family relationships; advertising and popular entertainment; film theory; and Quebec separatism. Time magazine included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005 list.[1] Title In addition to being the title given to the fictional film central to the story, reviewers have also considered the title a "sly wink at the book's massive girth. Wallace's working title for Infinite Jest had been A Failed Entertainment.[2] Setting In the novel's future world, North America is one unified state comprising the United States, Canada, and Mexico, known as the Organization of North American Nations (O.N.A.N.).
Characters The Incandenza family The Enfield Tennis Academy Les Assassins en Fauteuils Roulants. Infinite Summer » Blog Archive » How to Read Infinite Jest. Pages 3-27 - David Foster Wallace Wiki : Infinite Jest. Page 3 Uncle Charles Hal's Uncle, Charles Tavis, is head of the Enfield Tennis Academy. Remington-hung Hal is referring to the fact that the office he's in is decorated with art by Frederic Remington (1861-1909), an American painter whose work can be seen online here.
Half-Windsors A type of knot used to tie a necktie. Picture of a half-Windsor here. prorector See prorector. A. deLint See deLint index entry; p. 4. C.T. Periphery fringe; outer boundary Harold Incandenza Hal's full first name is given for the first time. Enfield A fictional town just west of Boston, where parts of the real Boston neighborhoods of Brighton and Allston exist in reality. Court-shaped like a tennis court, presumably Page 4 Organization of North American Nations Collegiate Athletic Association -- presumably the future complement of the NCAA. wen "A benign encysted tumor of the skin, esp. on the scalp, containing sebaceous matter; a sebaceous cyst" (Random House Unabridged Dictionary). avers Asserts as true or alleges.
Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace:Amazon:Books. Infinite Jest. Resources. Websites & Lists Wallace-l List Server – Mailing list for all things DFW since 1996 (archives available) The Howling Fantods – DWF news & resources since 1997Infinite Summer – 2009 group reading of Infinite JestFiction Advocate – Micropress and literary website featuring writings on DFW, including ‘Year of David Foster Wallace’ (2012) and the Infinite Jest live-blog, which is a record of reading Infinite Jest from beginning to end. Reading Tools, Guides, and References The Infinite Jest WikiInfinite Jest: A Scene by Scene Guide Elegant Complexity: A Study of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jestby Greg Carlisle [Amazon | IndieBound] [Publisher's description:] Elegant Complexity is the first critical work to provide detailed and thorough commentary on each of the 192 sections of David Foster Wallace’s masterful Infinite Jest.
How to (Literally) Cut Up Infinite Jest for Easier Reading Interviews The Bookworm Conversations An amazingly beautiful series of dialogues with Michael Silverblatt. David Foster Wallace Interview: Author On Ambition In PBS Animation. A Reader's Companion to Infinite Jest. William Dowling & Robert Bell. Reading response | david foster wallace. Two pieces of personal association on this one. Both will be brief. First one: I love seafood, including lobster. My father’s family are all Northeaterners, and have given me a heritage of love for the sea and its delicacies. Second one: I acquired Consider the Lobster early September 2008, days after I arrived here. This reading response is about lobster, in a tangential way. So why is lobster important? * My parents are fans of public television, which means I’ve watched a rather excessive amount of a program called “Rick Steves’ Travels in Europe”, which are a strange sight.