Abstract/Details

The eschatological imagination: Mediating David Foster Wallace's “Infinite Jest”

Jacobs, John Timothy.   McMaster University (Canada) ProQuest Dissertations Publishing,  2003. NQ86526.

Abstract (summary)

There is an inherent risk in studying contemporary fiction. Serious questions form around issues of an author's longevity and legacy, a work's merit and its endurance for later scholarship, and the varieties of current critical reception and methodology against the shifts to come. The attendant difficulty of assessing and analyzing a work before an industry of critical reception has formed also presents challenges. David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest (1996) represents these challenges, and much more; it is at once an encyclopedic novel of 1079 pages, full of both liberal arts and scientific erudition, and an encomium to an apocalyptic end of late millennial American culture. The novel is highly allegorical and operates with three crucial subtexts, in addition to the standard diegetic narrative. In this study, I present three different, though not mutually exclusive, interpretations of this novel, a novel that has presented interpretive difficulties to scholars of contemporary fiction. In Part One, I survey and compare Wallace's aesthetic with the radical, yet self-contained, aesthetic of the poet, G. M. Hopkins; Part Two examines the integral concept of mediation and explores the subtext of the return of the dead author—the novel operates, in part, as a rejoinder to the death-of-the-author critical impasse; Part Three is primarily comparative and analyzes Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov (1880). Wallace has rewritten (or reimagined) Dostoevsky's novel and translated it into a contemporary context and idiom as a remedy for postmodern American solipsism.

Indexing (details)


Subject
American literature;
Slavic literature;
Comparative literature;
British and Irish literature;
British & Irish literature
People
Vollmann, William T; Gass, William H (1924-2017); Stephenson, Neal; Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1908-1961); Gaddis, William (1922-1998); Pynchon, Thomas; Brecht, Bertolt (1898-1956); Hopkins, Gerard Manley (1844-1889); Shakespeare, William (1564-1616); Dostoevsky, Fyodor Mikhailovich (1821-1881)
Classification
0591: American literature
0314: Slavic literature
0295: Comparative literature
0593: British and Irish literature
Identifier / keyword
Language, literature and linguistics; Aesthetic; Dostoyevsky, Fyodor; Eschatological imagination; Fyodor Dostoyevsky; Gerard Manley Hopkins; Hopkins, Gerard Manley; Infinite Jest; Russia; Wallace, David Foster
Title
The eschatological imagination: Mediating David Foster Wallace's “Infinite Jest”
Author
Jacobs, John Timothy
Number of pages
241
Degree date
2003
School code
0197
Source
DAI-A 65/01, Dissertation Abstracts International
Place of publication
Ann Arbor
Country of publication
United States
ISBN
978-0-612-86526-6
Advisor
Ferns, John
University/institution
McMaster University (Canada)
University location
Canada -- Ontario, CA
Degree
Ph.D.
Source type
Dissertation or Thesis
Language
English
Document type
Dissertation/Thesis
Dissertation/thesis number
NQ86526
ProQuest document ID
305315823
Copyright
Database copyright ProQuest LLC; ProQuest does not claim copyright in the individual underlying works.
Document URL
https://www.proquest.com/docview/305315823