New in paperback
Understanding David Foster Wallace
Marshall Boswell
“A valuable introduction to Wallace and his first four books. Boswell provides enlightening interpretations of much of the fiction, especially in his use of Wittgenstein in
reading The Broom of the System and Lacan and Kierkegaard in reading Infinite Jest.”
—Review of Contemporary Fiction
Understanding David Foster Wallace guides readers through thoughtful examinations
of Wallace’s novels The Broom of the System and Infinite Jest and first two short story collections, Girl with Curious Hair and Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. In his readings of
these works, Marshall Boswell affirms that Wallace (1962–2008), in his fiction, compels
our attention for the singular excellence of his work and his groundbreaking effort to
chart a fruitful and affirmative new direction for literary fiction.
In addition to providing self-contained readings of each text, Boswell places Wallace
within a trajectory of literary innovation that begins with James Joyce and continues
through John Barth and Thomas Pynchon. Boswell contends that in charting a new
course for literary practice, Wallace did not seek merely to overturn postmodernism or
simply to return to modernism. Instead he moved resolutely forward with his fiction
hoisting the baggage of modernism and postmodernism heavily, but respectfully, on
its back.
Understanding Contemporary American Literature • Matthew J. Bruccoli, series editor
August 2009, 248 pages
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Marshall Boswell is an associate professor of English at Rhodes College in
Memphis. He is the author of John Updike’s Rabbit Tetralogy: Mastered Irony
in Motion, the short story collection
Trouble with Girls, and the novel Alternative Atlanta. Most recently he edited
the fourth volume of Facts on File The
Encyclopedia of American Literature.
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