David Foster Wallace and "The Long Thing"

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.

• List of AbbreviationsPreface: “David Foster Wallace and the Long Thing”Marshall Boswell, Rhodes College, USAPart I: Wallace as NovelistDavid Foster Wallace and the Novel of IdeasAdam Kelly, University of York, United KingdomWallace and Empathy: A Narrative ApproachToon Staes, University of Antwerp, BelgiumBoredom, Irony, and Anxiety: Wallace and the Kierkegaardian View of the SelfAllard den Dulk, Amsterdam University College, NetherlandsModelling Community and Narrative in Infinite Jest and The Pale KingAndrew Warren, Harvard University, USAPart II:The NovelsThe Broom of the System (1989)“Then Out of the Rubble”: David Foster Wallace’s Early FictionBradley J. Fest, University of Pittsburgh, USAInfinite Jest (1996)Representing Entertainment in Infinite JestPhilip Sayers, University of Toronto, CanadaEncyclopedic Novels and the Cruft of Fiction: Infinite Jest’s EndnotesDavid Letzler, CUNY Graduate Center, USAThe Pale King (2011)“A Paradigm for the Life of Consciousness”: The Pale KingStephen Burn, University of Glasgow, Scotland“What Am I, a Machine?”: Humans and Information in The Pale KingConley Wouters, Brandeis University, USAThe Politics of Boredom and the Boredom of Politics in The Pale KingRalph Clare, Boise State University, USATrickle-Down Citizenship: Taxes and Civic Responsibility in The Pale KingMarshall Boswell, Rhodes College, USAWorks CitedNotes on ContributorsIndex

A new collection of essays, edited by the pioneering Wallace scholar, Marshall Boswell, is dedicated to the literary form most conspicuously suited to a writer intent on communicating entire informational universes within and without … The essays here reflect the polymathic scope of Wallace’s engagement with the world and the world of ideas … A principle value of this collection is to gather early critical accounts of an encyclopedic novel destined to refine our view of Wallace’s achievement … As another prominent Wallace scholar, Stephen J. Burn, puts it here, we are still ‘at the prototype phase of The Pale King criticism … it is only when we start to disentangle what Wallace originally planned from the published text … that we can begin the critical project of understanding The Pale King in earnest.