David Foster Wallace's Balancing Books

Jeffrey Severs is associate professor of English at the University of British Columbia. He is the coeditor of Pynchon's "Against the Day": A Corrupted Pilgrim's Guide (2011) and has published articles in Modern Fiction Studies, Critique, Twentieth-Century Literature, and the Austin American-Statesman.

• Note on the Texts Acknowledgments Introduction: A Living Transaction: Value, Ground, and Balancing Books 1. Come to Work: Capitalist Fantasies and the Quest for Balance in The Broom of the System 2. New Deals: (The) Depression and Devaluation in the Early Stories 3. Dei Gratia: Work Ethic, Grace, and Giving in Infinite Jest 4. Other Math: Human Costs, Fractional Selves, and Neoliberal Crisis in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men 5. His Capital Flush: Despairing Over Work and Value in Oblivion 6. E Pluribus Unum: Ritual, Currency, and the Embodied Values of The Pale King Conclusion: In Line for the Cash Register with Wallace Notes Bibliography Index

Since its inception, David Foster Wallace studies has focused on a relatively small set of themes-irony, sincerity, addiction, and the mass media-often centered on Wallace's own descriptions of his literary project in interviews and essays. Severs's insightful new study builds on and challenges this critical orthodoxy, revealing how Wallace was a careful economic, political, and historical thinker. Wallace's writing, as Severs shows in a series of original and bracing chapters that cover the author's whole career, engaged provocatively with the New Deal, the social-welfare state, the monetary system, and the history of neoliberalism. Severs uncovers a new domain of questions that will dominate debates about Wallace's legacy and the meaning of his important art for decades to come. -- Lee Konstantinou, author of Cool Characters: Irony and American Fiction From this study, David Foster Wallace emerges as a 'rebellious economic thinker,' as well as a literary innovator and cultural critic. Severs has mastered Wallace's fiction and examines it through neoliberal policies to show seams of value-moral and economic-running throughout. Attentive to history and language, Severs demonstrates how Wallace represents work as a form of grace, weight as a means of uplift, and balance as an elusive aim. -- Heather Houser, author of Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect Jeffrey Severs has an archivist's nose for the 'good stuff' from David Foster Wallace's papers at the Ransom Center; he has an eagle eye for motifs that circulate from one Wallace book to another; and he is uncannily skillful in making apposite connections between Wallace and his precursors, contemporaries, and successors. Only someone as widely and deeply read in late-twentieth and early-twenty-first century literature as Severs could have pulled this off. -- Brian McHale, Distinguished Arts and Humanities Professor, Ohio State University