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The Wallace Effect explores David Foster Wallace's contested space at the forefront of 21st-century American fiction. Pioneering Wallace scholar Marshall Boswell does this by illuminating "The Wallace Effect"-the aura of literary competition that Wallace routinely summoned in his fiction and non-fiction and that continues to inform the reception of his work by his contemporaries.
A frankly combative writer, Wallace openly challenged his artistic predecessors as he sought to establish himself as the leading literary figure of the post-postmodern turn. Boswell challenges this portrait in two ways. First, he examines novels by Wallace's literary patriarchs and contemporaries that introduce innovations on traditional metafiction that Wallace would later claim as his own. Second, he explores four novels published after Wallace's ascendency that attempt to demythologize Wallace's persona and his literary preeminence.
By re-situating Wallace's work in a broader and more contentious literary arena,
The Wallace Effect traces both the reach and the limits of Wallace's legacy.
List of contents
Series Editor's Foreword
Introduction
Toward Wallace
1. Something Both and Neither: Marshes, Marriage and the Fertile Invention of John Barth's The Tidewater Tales
2. The Awful Way Back to We: Crackpot Realism and Ironic Realism in Richard Powers' Prisoner's Dilemma
The Wallace Effect
3. The Rival Lover: David Foster Wallace and the Anxiety of Influence in Jeffrey Eugenides; The Marriage Plot
4. The Varieties of Irony: Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children and the Comedy of Redemption
5. Competitive Friendship: Love and Reckoning in Jonathan Franzen's Freedom
6. Against Wallace: Amy Hungerford, Lauren Groff, and the Resistance to Genius
Conclusion: Love & Cruelty
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Marshall Boswell is Professor and Chair of English at Rhodes College, USA. He is the author of John Updike's Rabbit Tetralogy: Mastered Irony in Motion and Understanding David Foster Wallace. He is the co-editor, with Stephen Burn, of A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies and served as Guest Editor for a two-part special issue of Studies in the Novel devoted to David Foster Wallace's novels. He is also the the author of two works of fiction, Trouble with Girls and the novel Alternative Atlanta.
Summary
The Wallace Effect explores David Foster Wallace’s contested space at the forefront of 21st-century American fiction. Pioneering Wallace scholar Marshall Boswell does this by illuminating “The Wallace Effect”—the aura of literary competition that Wallace routinely summoned in his fiction and non-fiction and that continues to inform the reception of his work by his contemporaries.
A frankly combative writer, Wallace openly challenged his artistic predecessors as he sought to establish himself as the leading literary figure of the post-postmodern turn. Boswell challenges this portrait in two ways. First, he examines novels by Wallace’s literary patriarchs and contemporaries that introduce innovations on traditional metafiction that Wallace would later claim as his own. Second, he explores four novels published after Wallace’s ascendency that attempt to demythologize Wallace’s persona and his literary preeminence.
By re-situating Wallace’s work in a broader and more contentious literary arena, The Wallace Effect traces both the reach and the limits of Wallace’s legacy.
Foreword
The Wallace Effect traces the presence of David Foster Wallace and his fiction in the contemporary literary imagination.
Additional text
Marshall Boswell, a pioneer in the study of Wallace, writes with dexterity and lucidity here about some of the author’s favorite subjects: influence, autobiography, self-consciousness, and the need for literature to respond to what came before. Catching allusions and subtle critiques at every turn, Boswell weaves together predecessors, successors, and the man himself in a way that readers will find both instructive and fascinating.
