Part I, Readings for Written Project
Primary Text:
Wallace, David Foster. Infinite Jest: A Novel. Boston: Little, Brown & Company. 1996.
Print.
Comparator Texts:
Wallace, David Foster. The Broom of the System. New York: Penguin, 1987. Print.
---. Consider the Lobster and Other Essays. New York: Little, Brown, 2005. Print.
---. “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.” Review of Contemporary Fiction.
Summer 1993, Vol. 13, Issue 2. Pages 151 – 194.
---. Girl with Curious Hair. New York: W.W. Norton, 1989. Print.
---. This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion About Living a
Compassionate Life. New York: Little, Brown, 2009.
DeLillo, Don. Mao II. New York, N.Y., U.S.A: Viking, 1991. Print.
---. Underworld. New York: Scribner, 1997. Print.
---. White Noise. New York: Penguin, 1985. Print.
Franzen, Jonathan. The Corrections. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001. Print.
---. Freedom. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010. Print.
---. Strong Motion. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1992. Print.
Johnson, Denis. Already Dead: A California Gothic. New York, NY: HarperCollins,
1997. Print.
---. Jesus' Son: Stories. New York, N.Y: HarperPerennial, 1993. Print.
Moraga, Cherríe. Heroes and Saints & Other Plays. Albuquerque: West End Press, 1994.
Print.
Powers, Richard. The Echo Maker. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. Print.
---. Gain. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998. Print
Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: Penguin, 1973. Print.
---. Mason & Dixon. New York: Henry Holt, 1997. Print.
---. Vineland. New York, N.Y., U.S.A: Penguin Books, 1997. Print.
Silko, Leslie Marmon. Almanac of the Dead. New York: Penguin, 1992.
---. Ceremony. New York: Viking Press, 1977. Print.
Viramontes, Helena Maria. Their Dogs Came with Them: A Novel. New York: Atria,
2007. Print.
---. The Moths and Other Stories. Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1985. Print.
---. Under the Feet of Jesus. New York: Dutton, 1995. Print.
Vollman, William T. The Rainbow Stories. London: Picador, 1990. Print. [selections]
Yamashita, Karen T. Through the Arc of the Rain Forest. London: Scribners, 1991. Print.
---. Tropic of Orange: A Novel. Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press,
1997. Print.
Secondary Criticism on David Foster Wallace and Infinite Jest
Boswell, Marshall. Understanding David Foster Wallace. Columbia, SC: University of
South Carolina Press, 2003. Print.
Burn, Stephen. "Infinite Jest and the Twentieth Century: David Foster Wallace's Legacy."
Modernism/Modernity. 16.1 (2009): 12-19.
Delfino, Andrew S. Becoming the New Man in Post-Postmodernist Fiction. Saabruchen,
Germany: VDM Verlag Dr. Muller, 2007. Print.
Freudenthal, Elizabeth. "Anti-Interiority: Compulsiveness, Objectification, and Identity
in Infinite Jest." New Literary History. 41.1 (2010): 191-211.
Giles, Paul. “Sentimental Posthumanism: David Foster Wallace.” Twentieth-Century
Literature. 53.3 (Fall 2007): 327 – 344.
Hayles, N. Katherine. “The Illusion of Autonomy and the Fact of Recursivity: Virtual
Ecologies, Entertainment, and Infinite Jest”. New Literary History. 30.3
Ecocriticism Special Issue (Summer 1999): 675 – 697.
McLaughlin, Robert L. "Post-postmodern Discontent: Contemporary Fiction and the
Social World." Symploke. 12.1 (2005): 53-68. Print.
Russell, Emily. "Some Assembly Required: The Embodied Politics of Infinite Jest."
Arizona Quarterly. 66.3 (2010): 147-169.
Siskind, Jay M. "An Undeniably Controversial and Perhaps Even Repulsive Talent."
Modernism/modernity. 11.4 (2005): 819-821. Print.
Wallace, David Foster, ed. The Future of Fiction: A Forum. Normal, IL: The Review of
Contemporary Fiction, 1996. Print.
Theoretical Approaches to Infinite Jest
Beck, Ulrich. Ecological Enlightenment: Essays on the Politics of the Risk Society.
Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1995. Print.
---. “Living in the World Risk Society” Economy and Society. 35.3
(August 2006): 329 – 345.
---. World at Risk. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2009. Print.
Buell, Lawrence. Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and
Environment in the U.S. and Beyond. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 2001. Print.
Cohen, Samuel S. After the End of History: American Fiction in the 1990s. Iowa City:
University of Iowa Press, 2009. Print.
Davis, Todd F. “Postmodern (Midwestern) Morality: The Act of Affirming Humanity in
a Screwed-up World.” In Kurt Vonnegut's Crusade, Or, How a Postmodern
Harlequin Preached a New Kind of Humanism. Albany: State University of New
York Press, 2006. Pages 1-36. Print.
Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books, 1994. Print.
Heise, Ursula K. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of
the Global. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Print.
---. “Toxins, Drugs and Global Systems: Risk and Narrative in the Contemporary Novel.”
American Literature. 74.4 (December 2002). 747-778.
Jurca, Catherine. White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth-Century American
Novel. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001. Print.
Little, William G. The Waste Fix: Seizures of the Sacred from Upton Sinclair to the
Sopranos. New York: Routledge, 2002. Print.
Moya, Paula M.L Learning from Experience: Minority Identities, Multicultural
Struggles. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Print.
---. “Postmodernism, ‘Realism,’ and the Politics of Identity.” Reclaiming Identity: Realist
Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism. Eds. Paula M.L. Moya and
Michael R. Hames-Garcia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Pages 67101.
Prosser, Jay. American Fiction of the 1990s: Reflections of History and Culture.
Abingdon, England: Routledge, 2008. Print.
Wegner, Phillip E. Life Between Two Deaths, 1989-2001: U.S. Culture in the Long
Nineties. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. Print.
Yarbrough, Stephen R. Deliberate Criticism: Toward a Postmodern Humanism. Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 1992. Print.
Part II: Readings Providing Context for the Dissertation
American Fiction, 1945 to Present
Alexie, Sherman. The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. New York: Atlantic
Monthly Press, 1993. Print.
---. The Toughest Indian in the World. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2000. Print.
Atwood, Margaret. Oryx and Crake. New York: Anchor Books, 2003. Print.
---. The Year of the Flood. New York: Doubleday, 2009. Print.
Auster, Paul. City of Glass. New York: Penguin Books, 1987. Print.
Baldwin, James. Go Tell It on the Mountain. New York: Dial Press, 1963. Print.
---. Giovanni's Room: A Novel. New York: Dial Press, 1956. Print.
Barth, John. Lost in the Funhouse: Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice. Garden City, N.Y:
Doubleday, 1968. Print. [selections]
Barthelme, Donald. Forty Stories. London: Penguin, 2005. Print. [selections]
Bellow, Saul. The Adventures of Augie March: A Novel. New York: Viking Press, 1953.
Print.
---. Herzog. New York: Viking Press, 1964. Print.
---. More Die of Heartbreak. New York: Penguin. 1987. Print.
Burroughs, William S, Naked Lunch. New York: Grove Press, 2003. Print
Carver, Raymond. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: Stories. New York:
Knopf, 1981. Print. [selections]
Castillo, Ana. So Far from God: A Novel. New York: W.W. Norton, 1993. Print.
Cisneros, Sandra. Caramelo, Or, Puro Cuento: A Novel. New York: Knopf, 2002. Print.
---. The House on Mango Street. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1994. Print.
Coover, Robert. The Public Burning. New York: Viking Press, 1977. Print.
Danticat, Edwidge. The Farming of Bones: A Novel. New York, NY: Soho Press, 1998.
Print.
Díaz, Junot. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. New York: Riverhead Books, 2007.
Print.
Dick, Philip K. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? New York: Ballantine Books,
1996. Print.
Dillard, Annie. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. New York: Harper's Magazine Press, 1974.
Print.
Dorfman, Ariel. The Resistance Trilogy: Widows; Death and the Maiden; Reader.
London: Nick Hern Books, 1998. Print.
Eggers, Dave. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. New York: Simon &
Schuster, 2000. Print.
---. Zeitoun. San Francisco: McSweeney's Books, 2009. Print.
Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Modern Library, 1994. Print.
Erdrich, Louise. The Plague of Doves. New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers, 2008.
Print.
Eugenides, Jeffrey. Middlesex. New York: Picador, 2002. Print.
Gibson, William. Neuromancer. New York: Ace Books, 2004. Print.
---. Pattern Recognition. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2003. Print.
Heller, Joseph. Catch-22: A Novel. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1961. Print.
Jones, Edward P. The Known World. New York: Amistad, 2003. Print.
Kerouac, Jack. The Dharma Bums. New York, N.Y., U.S.A: Penguin Books, 1990. Print.
Kesey, Ken. Sometimes a Great Notion: A Novel. New York: Viking Press, 1964. Print.
Kingston, Maxine H. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. New
York: Knopf, 1976. Print.
Kushner, Tony. Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. New York:
Theatre Communications Group, 1993. Print.
Le Guin, Ursula. K. The Lathe of Heaven. New York: Avon, 1973. Print.
McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian, or, The Evening Redness in the West. New York:
Random House, 1985. Print.
Momaday, N S. House Made of Dawn. New York: Harper & Row, 1968. Print.
Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Penguin, 1998. Print.
---. Paradise. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1998. Print.
O'Connor, Flannery. Wise Blood. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1952. Print.
O’Neill, Joseph. Netherland. New York: Pantheon Books, 2008. Print.
Paredes, Américo. George Washington Gómez: A Mexicotexan Novel. Houston, Tex:
Arte Publico Press, 1990. Print.
Phillips, Jayne A. Lark and Termite: A Novel. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. Print.
---. Machine Dreams. New York: Dutton/S. Lawrence, 1984. Print.
Plascencia, Salvador. The People of Paper. San Francisco: McSweeney's Books, 2005.
Print.
Reed, Ishmael. Mumbo Jumbo. Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday, 1972. Print.
Smith, Anna D. Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992. New York: Anchor Books, 1994. Print.
Thi Diem Thúy Lê. The Gangster We Are All Looking For. New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
2003. Print.
Tower, Wells. Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 2009. Print.
Vizenor, Gerald R. Landfill Meditation: Crossblood Stories. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan
University Press, 1991. Print.
Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-five, Or, the Children's Crusade. New York:
Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, 1994. Print.
Wideman, John E. Philadelphia Fire: A Novel. New York: Holt, 1990. Print.
Williams, Terry Tempest. Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place. New
York: Vintage, 2001. Print.
Theorizing Postmodern Literature
Anderson, Perry. The Origins of Postmodernity. London: Verso, 1998. Print.
Barth, John. The Literature of Exhaustion; And, the Literature of Replenishment.
Northridge, Calif: Lord John Press, 1982. Print.
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1994.
Green, Jeremy. Late Postmodernism: American Fiction at the Millennium. New York:
Palgrave, 2005.
Heise, Ursula K. Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1997.
Hogue, W L. Postmodern American Literature and Its Other. Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 2009. Print.
Huehls, Mitchum. "Knowing What We Are Doing: Time, Form, and the Reading of
Postmodernity." Cultural Critique. 61.1 (2005): 55-86.
Hoberek, Andrew. The Twilight of the Middle Class: Post-world War II American
Fiction and White-Collar Work. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2005.
Print.
Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 1989. Print.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham:
Duke University Press, 1991.
McGurl, Mark. "The Program Era: Pluralisms of Postwar American Fiction." Critical
Inquiry. 32.1 (Fall 2005): 102-29.
Michaels, Walter Benn. The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History. Princeton:
Princeton UP, 2004.
Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2004. Print.
Wolfe, Tom. "Stalking the Billion Footed Beast: A Literary Manifesto for the New Social
Novel." Harper's Nov. 1989: 45-56.
Theorizing Race, Gender and Sexuality
Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "sex". New York:
Routledge, 1993. Print.
Dávila, Arlene M. Latinos, Inc: The Marketing and Making of a People. Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 2001. Print.
Dyer, Richard. White. London: Routledge, 1997. Print.
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge,
Mass: Harvard University Press, 1993. Print.
Giroux, Henry. “Postmodernism as Border Pedagogy: Redefining the Boundaries of Race
and Ethnicity.” A Postmodern Reader. Linda Hutcheon and Joseph P. Natoli, eds..
Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993. 452-496. Print.
hooks, bell. Feminist Theory: From the Margins to the Center. Boston: South End Press,
1984.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. European perspectives. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Print.
Lipsitz, George. The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from
Identity Politics. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998. Print.
Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New
York: Vintage, 1993.
Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. Racial Formation in the United States: From the
1960s to the 1980s. New York: Routledge, 1986. Print.
Saldívar, Ramón. The Borderlands of Culture: Américo Paredes and the Transnational
Imaginary. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. Print.
Sandoval, Chela. Methodology of the Oppressed. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000
Sedgwick, Eve K. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1990. Print.
Shohat, Ella, and Robert Stam. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the
Media. London; New York: Routledge, 1994. Print.
Ecocriticism and Ecocritical Theory
Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Print.
Armbruster, Karla, and Kathleen R. Wallace. Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the
Boundaries of Ecocriticism. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001.
Bennett, Michael, and David W. Teague. The Nature of Cities: Ecocriticism and Urban
Environments. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999.
Buell, Lawrence. The Future of Environmental Criticism. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005.
Bullard, Robert D. "Environmental Justice in the 21st Century: Race Still Matters."
Phylon. 49. 4 (2001): 151-171.
Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. New York: Fawcett Crest, 1962.
Corbett, Steven J. “Environmental (and Audience) Friendliness in Rachel Carson and
Devra Davis: Where Ecocriticism and Rhetoric Meet.” ISLE. 16.3 (2009): 487515.
Cronon, William. Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. New
York: W.W. Norton & Co, 1996.
DeLoughrey, Elizabeth and George H. Handley, eds. Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures
of the Environment. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism. London: Routledge, 2004.
Gifford, Terry. “Biosemiology and Globalism in The Rapture by Liz Jensen.”
English Studies. 91.7 (2010): 713-727.
Guha, Ramachandra, and Alier J. Martínez. Varieties of Environmentalism: Essays North
and South. London: Earthscan Publications, 1997. Print.
Handley, George B. "Toward an Environmental Phenomenology of Diaspora." Modern
Fiction Studies. 55.3 (2009): 649-657.
Haraway, Donna J. The Haraway Reader. New York: Routledge, 2003. Print.
Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1999.
Huggan, Graham, and Helen Tiffin. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals,
Environment. London: Routledge, 2010. Print.
Kerridge, Richard, and Neil Sammells. Writing the Environment: Ecocriticism and
Literature. London: Zed Books, 1998.
Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden; Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1964.
Marzec, Robert P. “Speaking Before the Environment: Modern Fiction and the
Ecological.” Modern Fiction Studies. 55.3 (2009): 419-442.
Morton, Timothy. Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics.
Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2007.
---. "Guest Column: Queer Ecology." PMLA. 125.2 (2010): 273-282. Print.
Newman, Lance. “Marxism and Ecocriticism,” ISLE. 9.2 (Summer 2002): 1-25.
Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, Mass:
Harvard University Press, 2011. Print.
Phillips, Dana. The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Print.
Plumwood, Val. "The Concept of a Cultural Landscape: Nature, Culture and Agency of
the Land." Ethics & the Environment. 11. 2 (2006): 115-150.
Reed, T.V. “Toward an Environmental Justice Ecocriticism.” Joni Adamson, Mei Mei
Evans, and Rachel Stein, eds. The Environmental Justice Reader: Politics,
Poetics, & Pedagogy. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2002. Print.
---. "Toxic Colonialism, Environmental Justice, and Native Resistance in Silko’s
Almanac of the Dead." MELUS. 34.2 (2009): 25-42.
Soper, Kate. What Is Nature?: Culture, Politics, and the Non-Human. Oxford: Blackwell,
1998. Print.
Wolfe, Cary. What Is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.
Print.
Yaeger, Patricia. "The Death of Nature and the Apotheosis of Trash; or, Rubbish
Ecology." PMLA 123 (2008): 321-339.