David Foster Wallace & Environs
Professor Andrew Warren
T, 2-4; 018 Barker Center
English 90we
warren@fas.harvard.edu
Office hours: Th 1-3, 069 Barker
This course looks at the scene of contemporary American fiction via the work of someone whom many-perhaps controversially--have called the “writer of his generation”: David Foster Wallace. Our investigation
will span nearly all Wallace’s career (from the early story collection Girl with Curious Hair to Infinite Jest to
his posthumous Pale King), and will engage with writers who influenced him (e.g. Pynchon, Ellison, and
Barth) and others whom he influenced (such as Aimee Bender, Dave Eggers and Junot Diaz). Three
interrelated questions will start off our readings:
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a) What is the role for something like sincerity in a world that trades in irony, insincerity and
inattention?
b) How does the self sift through the “tsunami of available fact” presented to it each day, hour,
minute, second? How should it?
& c) What does fiction have to do with any of this? How do you present these problems (much
less the solutions) in fictional form? What good is it?
Textbooks (Required):
David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (978-0316925280)
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Girl with Curious Hair (978-0393313963)
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Infinite Jest (978-0316066525)
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Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (978-0316925198)
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Consider the Lobster (978-0316013321)
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The Pale King (978-0316074230)
Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (978-0060913076)
Paula Fox, Desperate Characters (978-0393318944)
Dave Eggers, Zeitoun (978-0307387943)
Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth (978-0375707544)
Textbooks (Recommended):
James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood (978-0375423727)
Jhumpa Lahiri, Unaccustomed Earth (978-0307278258)
Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (978-0679745426)
Assignments:
● Prose Comparisons (5%): See below.
● Response Papers (30%): Five two-page responses (1.5-spacing); two of these may be written as
parodies or pastiches
● Prospectus (5%): a two-page proposal for the final paper
● Final Paper (60%): a 13-15 page paper due on the final day of reading period
Schedule: Readings are to be completed in full by the dates listed below. Readings not available in
course textbooks will be available as handouts in class, or posted to the course website.
Prose Comparisons: In most weeks a short story or small selection from a novel will be assigned to read
alongside the selection from Wallace. These P.C.’s are meant to a) give a feel for the craft of prose in
contemporary American fiction; and b) bring DFW’s prose technique into relief against that background.
Each week one or two students will be asked to give presentations of short close readings of the prose.
I. Introduction
Week 0 - Writerly craft and the contemporary American sentence.
II. Irony
Week 1 - DFW from A Supposedly Fun Thing (1991-97): “E Unibus Pluram,” “Getting Away,” “Tennis
Player Michael Joyce’s Professional Artistry,” “A Supposedly Fun Thing”; from Consider the Lobster
(2004), “Authority and American Usage”; from Girl with Curious Hair (1989), “My Appearance”
● In Class: from Strunk and White, The Elements of Style (4th ed.), pp. 15-33, 66-85--(hint: this is
something of a ruse, and will be handed out in class)
Week 2 - Barth “Lost in the Funhouse” (1968); DFW, from Girl with Curious Hair (1989): “Little
Expressionless Animals”; “Girl with Curious Hair”; “Lyndon”; “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its
Way”; interview from RCF (1993)
● from, McGurl, The Program Era (2010)
● Rick Moody, “Writers and Mentors” (Atlantic 2005)
Week 3 – Paula Fox, Desperate Characters (1970); DFW, GwCH “Here and There”; “Everything Is Green”
 Jhumpa Lahiri, “Unaccustomed Earth” (2007)
 Prose Comparison, Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections (2001), pp. 1-20
III. Information
Week 4 - Pynchon, Intro to Slow Learner (1984); “Entropy” (1959); The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)
● from Gleick, The Information (2011), 3-27; 204-86
● Prose Comparison: Tom Clancy, from Clear and Present Danger (1989), 1-9
Week 5 - DFW Infinite Jest (1996)
● Dave Eggers, “Introduction”
● Prose Comparison: Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping (1980), pp. 3-5
Week 6 - DFW Infinite Jest
● Prose Comparison: William Gaddis, J.R. (1974), pp. 1-5
● Jonathan Franzen, “Mr. Difficult: William Gaddis and the Problem of Hard-to-Read Books” (2002)
Week 7 - DFW Infinite Jest
● Prose Comparison: Ron Carlson, “Plan B for the Middle Class” (1992), pp. 167-72
● Recommended: Timothy Aubrey, Reading as Therapy: What Contemporary Fiction Does for the
Middle Class (2011) – Intro & Ch.3 (“Infinite Jest and the Recovery of Feeling”)
Week 8 - DFW Infinite Jest
● Prose Comparison: Don Delillo, from Underworld (1997), 11-21
● N. Katherine Hayles, “The Illusion of Autonomy and the Fact of Recursivity: Virtual Ecologies,
Entertainment, and "Infinite Jest" (1999)
IV. Reinvention
Week 9 - DFW, from Brief Interviews (1999); from Oblivion, “Good Old Neon” (2005); from Consider the
Lobster, “Big Red Son”
● Junot Diaz, “Negocios” (1997)
● Aimee Bender, “Girl in the Flammable Skirt” (1999)
● Recommended: Zadie Smith, “BIwHM and the Difficult Gifts of DFW”
Week 10 - Week 9 - Dave Eggers, Zeitoun (2009)
● From DFW, Consider the Lobster, “Host”
V. Incompleteness
Week 11 - Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth (1953 to 2000)
● Prose Comparison: Ellison, “Hickson in Washington D.C.” (“Arrival”), from Three Days Before the
Shooting (2010), pp. 503-37
● from Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark (1992)
● Recommended: Adam Bradley, Ralph Ellison in Progress (2010)
Week 12 - DFW Pale King (2011), selections
● DFW, Kenyon Commencement Speech (“This Is Water”)