Global Wallace

Lucas Thompson is a Research Fellow at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, Australia. His primary research is on contemporary U.S. fiction and its intersections with world literature. Other research interests include aesthetics, affect, intertextuality, literary influence, and the relationship between film and literature.

• Series Editor’s IntroductionAcknowledgmentsIntroduction. Wallace and the WorldChapter One. Wallace and World LiteratureChapter Two. Wallace and Latin AmericaChapter Three. Wallace and RussiaChapter Four. Wallace and Eastern Europe: Kafka and OthersChapter Five. French Existentialism’s Afterlives: Wallace and the Fiction of the U.S. SouthChapter Six. African-American Appropriations: Race, Hip-Hop, and Popular Anthropology Conclusion. “It’s a Small Continent After All”? Wallace and the WorldBibliographyIndex

When a piece of literary criticism makes you aware at every turn of the substantial limits not just of your knowledge of a subject—one you thought you knew something about—but also of the frameworks in which you think, its worth and importance are blindingly obvious. Such was my experience in reading Lucas Thompson’s Global Wallace: David Foster Wallace and World Literature. Its well-researched and wide-ranging attention to Wallace’s global influences and intertexts should also be a shot of adrenaline into a Wallace Studies. … Thompson’s book is itself a model of diligent criticism—impeccably researched, clearly written and organized, and (increasingly rare in new work on Wallace) appropriately contextualized in the rich network of Wallace criticism that came before it. ... It will prompt critics to bring a variety of new lenses to bear on his fiction and nonfiction, likely generating an abundance of exciting new readings and pathways for readings in classrooms and on the page.