Sunday, January 09, 2011

The Afterlife of David Foster Wallace - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

On the rise and rise of Wallace scholarship:
Boswell said that, as early as Wallace's debut novel, The Broom of the System, it was apparent that the writer had a new, ambitious, ethically charged agenda. "The first novel announced very clearly that Wallace wanted to revive the tradition of postmodern maximalism, generally associated with writers like John Barth, William Gaddis, and Thomas Pynchon, but also that he was going to do it in a way that made sense to members of his own generation, who grew up in the desolate aftermath of the 1960s and no longer needed to be shown the hollow hypocrisy of the bourgeois social order or whatever," he said.