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    A Kierkegaardian Reading of David Foster Wallace
    A Kierkegaardian Reading of David Foster Wallace
    A Kierkegaardian Reading of David Foster Wallace
    Ebook75 pages1 hour

    A Kierkegaardian Reading of David Foster Wallace

    By Matthew Campora

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    This work explores the fiction of David Foster Wallace through frameworks developed by nineteenth century Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard to foreground the similarities in their approaches to the problem of irony, as well as in their strategies for overcoming the cynicism they believe it often produces. Kierkegaard's thesis, "The Concept of Irony: With Continual Reference to Socrates" is the focal point for the discussion of irony in this paper, where it will be argued that Wallace, like Kierkegaard, wrote inventive texts, theorized irony and its limitations, and sought ways beyond it. Wallace's fiction will be shown to offer a relentlessly sophisticated critique of contemporary American culture, yet also to offer a compassionate attempt to construct something redemptive to replace the emptiness it so deftly describes. To do this, it will consider Wallace's "Infinite Jest" and two collections of his short fiction - "Brief Interviews With Hideous Men" and "Oblivion".

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMatthew Campora
    Release dateSep 10, 2014
    ISBN9781310937149
    A Kierkegaardian Reading of David Foster Wallace
    Author

    Matthew Campora

    Matthew Campora is a Senior Lecturer at the Australian Film Television and Radio School and an Honorary Research Fellow at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland. He holds an MPhil in literary studies and a PhD in film studies and is the author of "Subjective Realist Cinema: From Caligari to Inception" (Berghahn 2014).

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      Concise consideration of selected works of David Foster Wallace in relation to some of Kierkegaard's ideas.

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    A Kierkegaardian Reading of David Foster Wallace - Matthew Campora

    A Kierkegaardian Reading of David Foster Wallace

    By

    Matthew Steven Campora

    Senior Lecturer, Australian Film Television and Radio School;

    Honorary Research Fellow, Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies,

    University of Queensland

    Smashwords Edition

    Published by Matthew Steven Campora

    Copyright 2014

    Smashwords Edition, License Notes

    This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

    Abstract: This work explores the fiction of David Foster Wallace through frameworks developed by nineteenth century Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard to foreground the similarities in their approaches to the problem of irony, as well as in their strategies for overcoming the cynicism they believe it often produces. Kierkegaard's thesis, The Concept of Irony: With Continual Reference to Socrates is the focal point for the discussion of irony in this paper, where it will be argued that Wallace, like Kierkegaard, wrote inventive texts, theorized irony and its limitations, and sought ways beyond it. Wallace's fiction will be shown to offer a relentlessly sophisticated critique of contemporary American culture, yet also to offer a compassionate attempt to construct something redemptive to replace the emptiness it so deftly describes. To do this, it will consider Wallace's Infinite Jest and two collections of his short fiction - Brief Interviews With Hideous Men and Oblivion.

    Table of Contents

    Preface

    Introduction

    Irony

    E Unibus Pluram

    The Kierkegaardian Concept of Irony

    Kierkegaard’s Modalities and Wallace’s Infinite Jest

    The Aesthetic Sphere

    The Ethical Sphere

    The Religious Sphere

    David Foster Wallace’s Kierkegaardian Answer to Cynicism

    Aestheticism and Mastered Irony in Infinite Jest

    Brief Interviews With Hideous Men

    Oblivion

    Conclusion

    Endnotes

    Works Consulted

    Preface

    This work is an adaptation of a Master of Philosophy dissertation completed at the University of Queensland in 2003. The focus of the adaptation was to eliminate extraneous material in the attempt to make the work clearer and more succinct. The argument of the original has not been altered in any significant way; and, though the author feels that the material contained herein may have relevance for future scholarship, he also feels that the suicide of David Foster Wallace haunts the text, perhaps demanding a re-evaluation of some of its conclusions.

    Introduction

    David Foster Wallace was one of the most high-profile writers of his generation. He received critical acclaim for his challenging fiction, and attracted relatively large audiences, particularly his novel Infinite Jest – one of the most influential books of the mid-nineties. Later in the decade, A.O. Scott christened Wallace the heir to such postmodern old masters as John Barth, William Gaddis, and Thomas Pynchon (39), and Time Magazine counted him amongst an elite group of young literary authors that also included Jonathan Franzen, Rick Moody, and Donald Antrim (Fiction’s New Fab Four 89). Wallace regularly published pieces in Harper’s, The New Yorker, and Rolling Stone and was certainly one of the most important of the small group of public intellectuals of his generation. Before his suicide in 2011, he had published three novels and three collections of short fiction as well as a commentary on the concept of infinity and two collections of essays. His essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction has been seen by some critics as a literary manifesto, similar in kind to John Barth’s The Literature of Exhaustion (1967). i Wallace’s essay includes, among other things, a criticism of Image-Fiction, a genre of literature that he saw as emerging from the confluence of postmodern American fiction ii and commercial television. He argues that the postmodern literary aesthetic employed by Image-Fiction writers was already devoid of its critical capacity, and he illustrated this using the work of Mark Leyner, the movement’s brightest star. Wallace’s E Unibus Pluram" is the starting point for this paper, and simply stated, the argument presented here is that the position articulated in Wallace’s critical work and developed in his fiction has much in common with that of Søren Kierkegaard, the nineteenth century Danish philosopher-poet. Kierkegaard saw himself, above all, as a poet, and his large body of pseudonymous writings are philosophical fictions rather than treatises.

    Interestingly, before embarking on his literary career, Kierkegaard was a student and a theorist, and his master’s thesis, The Concept of Irony: With Continual Reference to Socrates is still considered a significant text by Kierkegaard scholars as well as those

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