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David Foster Wallace Studies
Vol.1
Series Editor
Stephen J. Burn, University of Glasgow, UK
Advisory Board
Kasia Boddy, University of Cambridge, UK
Marshall Boswell, Rhodes College, USA
Paul Giles, University of Sydney, Australia
Luc Herman, University of Antwerp, Belgium
Mary K. Holland, e State University of New York at New Paltz, USA
Steven Moore, Independent Scholar, USA
Volumes in the Series
Vol. 1. Global Wallace
Lucas ompson
Vol. 2. e Wallace E ect
Marshall Boswell
Vol. 3. Wallace’s Dialects (forthcoming)
Mary Shapiro
Global Wallace
David Foster Wallace and World Literature
Lucas ompson
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First published in Great Britain 2017
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Copyright © Lucas Thompson, 2017
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Thompson, Lucas, author.
Title: Global Wallace : David Foster Wallace and world literature / Lucas Thompson.
Other titles: David Foster Wallace and world literature
Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. | Series: David Foster Wallace studies ; 1 |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifi ers: LCCN 2016020576 (print) | LCCN 2016037003 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501320668
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Subjects: LCSH: Wallace, David Foster–Criticism and interpretation. |
American literature–Foreign infl uences. | Internationalism in literature. |
Literature and society–United States–History–20th century. | American
fi ction–20th century–History and criticism. | BISAC: LITERARY CRITICISM/ General. |
LITERARY CRITICISM / American / General.
Classifi cation: LCC PS3573.A425635 Z88 2016 (print) |
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for Catherine
Series Editor’s Introduction ix
Introduction. Wallace and the World 1
“Territorial reconfigurations”: Wallace and world literary space 19
1 Wallace and World Literature 25
A genealogy of world literature 25
Resisting Bloom’s “Influenza”: Influence and intertextuality 36
An Emersonian pragmatist: Wallace’s global quotations 46
2 Wallace and Latin America 51
“e wacko Latins”: Manuel Puig and the lure of Latin-
American experimentalists 51
Depoliticizing Manuel Puig and Jamaica Kincaid 59
Code- scrambling Borges 71
Programming literary influence 85
3 Wallace and Russia 89
Wallace’s Dostoevsky obsession 93
Retelling e Death of Ivan Ilyich in “Good Old Neon” 106
Holographic influence 111
4 Wallace and Eastern Europe: Kaa and Others 117
High art precedents: Wallace and the European literary
tradition 117
Posthumanizing Kaa 126
Wallace’s Kaaesque comic sensibility 142
A literary “touchstone”: Transposing Kaa 155
5 French Existentialism’s Aerlives: Wallace and the Fiction of
the US South 161
“Ooohhh, the big, sexy like philosophical term”: Wallace and
French existentialism 161
Walker Percy and “ontological insecurity” 170
Contents
viii Contents
Flannery O’Connor’s “bloody grace” 180
Americanizing existentialism 190
6 African-American Appropriations: Race, Hip-Hop, and Popular
Anthropology 197
e “erasure of difference”: Wallace and race 197
“Another Pioneer” and popular anthropology 205
Ms. Chahla Neti-Neti and Joseph Campbell 216
Signifying Rappers: Wallace’s racial ethnography 220
Wallace as intertextual “sampler” 232
Conclusion. “It’s a Small Continent Aer All”? Wallace and
the World 237
Acknowledgments 245
Bibliography 247
Index 265
Lucas ompson’s Global Wallace is the first volume in Bloomsbury’s new
series, David Foster Wallace Studies. e series is driven by the belief that the
exponential growth in interest in Wallace’s work during recent years
necessitates a corresponding evolution in the way we think about Wallace’s
writing. It is no longer necessary to make a case for Wallace’s worthiness as a
subject of scholarly attention when, as Jonathan Franzen notes, “a literary
establishment that had never so much as short- listed one of his books for a
national prize [has] now united to declare him a lost national treasure.”1 Nor,
as books and essays on Wallace proliferate, is it necessary to offer a book- by-
book appraisal of a body of work that has already received its preliminary
surveys, and whose abiding obsessions and contours are largely clear. What is
now needed is work that has absorbed the lessons of earlier scholarship and
is ready to move Wallace criticism into new areas, rather than, as N. Katherine
Hayles writes of Mark Taylor, acting as if the critic were “Robinson Crusoe,
surveying a trackless beach, when in fact there are critical footprints
everywhere.”2 is series attempts to facilitate that movement by publishing
volumes that find a way to alter the horizons of Wallace scholarship. e
focus of some of these volumes will be Wallace- intensive, taking as their goal
the need to develop new perspectives on the now extant body of Wallace’s
work; others will respond to the particularly urgent need to see Wallace in
context, putting his work back into its vibrant literary, social, and cultural
context. Whether re- formulating the axioms of Wallace criticism, bringing
his work into dialogue with unexplored theoretical models, or remapping the
coordinates that govern our understanding of contemporary fiction, the
series will emphasize work that does not re- invent the wheel, but builds on
earlier scholarship in an effort to genuinely advance Wallace studies.
Wallace criticism really begins in the early 1990s, though with few
exceptions,3 his significance for academics at this time hinged almost entirely
Series Editor’s Introduction
1 Jonathan Franzen, Farther Away (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux 2012), 38.
2 N. Katherine Hayles, “Rewiring Literary Criticism,” review of Rewiring the Real, by Mark
C. Taylor, Los Angeles Review of Books, June 15, 2013, accessed April 21, 2016. Online
access: https://lareviewoooks.org/article/rewiring- literary-criticism/.
3 Some notable examples would include a group of short essays, in an ANQ issue devoted
to “e Future of American Fiction,” which singled Wallace out as “a young writer worth
watching”; earlier still, Neil D. Isaacs devoted a page to discussing “the figure of the stand-
up comedian” in Broom. See, Steven Moore, “Fin de Siecle,” ANQ 5 (1992): 224; and Neil
D. Isaacs, “Fiction Night at the Comedy Club,” New England Review and Bread Loaf
Quarterly 11 (1989): 309.
Series Editor’s Introductionx
on his writing about rap music.4 With the publication of Infinite Jest (1996),
this critical asymmetry was gradually corrected thanks, in part, to the novel’s
obvious cultural range and significance, but perhaps also to the quality of the
early essays—by Tom LeClair, Hayles, and Frank Cioffi—devoted to it. Built
over these foundations, twenty- first-century Wallace criticism remains, at its
best, a diverse field that “contains within itself an open . . . dialogue on the
viabilities of its major methodological choices,”5 and it is important not to
oversimplify its variety. Some of the most innovative recent approaches, for
instance, manage to convincingly read Wallace’s work through unexpected
dialogues with numismatics (Jeffrey Severs), approaches to the “infowhelm”
(Heather Houser), and institutional frameworks (Mark McGurl).
Nevertheless—and with that caveat in mind—it is possible to trace some of
the field’s most persistent preoccupations.
Perhaps the first lesson we learn when looking back on the extant body of
Wallace scholarship is that to write about Wallace for many critics is to write
about the mechanics of literary influence. For good reasons, Wallace
scholarship has carried on a kind of stereoscopic project, where the Wallace
text under investigation is read in parallel with some antecedent work that is
laid alongside it. is approach was inaugurated by LeClair’s pioneering
reading of Infinite Jest as the work of a “Pynchon protégé,”6 was extended in
early note articles linking Wallace to Stendhal (by Timothy Jacobs) and
Shakespeare (by Jonathan Goodwin), and continued through Marshall
Boswell’s alert reading of Broom’s dialogue with Updike to Brian McHale’s
account of submerged Pynchonian traces in e Pale King. e second lesson
we learn is about the Americanness of Wallace’s American literature. By far
the most common reference points that Wallace scholarship invokes are to
what Steven Moore calls the “totemic postmodern masterpieces” that key
American writers produced in Wallace’s formative years (Moore, more
expansive than most, identifies Pynchon, Gaddis, Delany, Coover, Barthelme,
Barth and Sorrentino as the central figures).7 Even where more cosmopolitan
traditions are envisaged, overseas writers (most oen Dostoevsky) tend to be
normalized to fit within a narrow American trajectory.
4 See, among others, David Sanjek, “ ‘Don’t Have to DJ No More’: Sampling and the
‘Autonomous’ Creator,” Cardozo Arts and Entertainment Law Journal 10 (1991): 607–24;
Gregory Stephens, “Interracial Dialogue in Rap Music,” New Formations 16 (1992):
62–79; and Philip V. Bohlman, “Musicology as a Political Act,” Journal of Musicology 11
(1993): 411–36.
5 Eric Hayot, “Against Periodization; or, On Institutional Time,” New Literary History 42
(2011): 739.
6 Tom LeClair, “e Prodigious Fiction of Richard Powers, William Vollmann, and David
Foster Wallace,” Critique 38 (1996): 36.
7 Moore, “In Memoriam David Foster Wallace,” Modernism/Modernity 16 (2009): 1.
Series Editor’s Introduction xi
Neither trend is entirely aberrant. Reading Wallace in stereoscopic fashion
has persisted, in part, because it responds to a real dimension of Wallace’s
artistic practice. Equally, properly rigorous accounts of Wallace’s specifically
American literary ancestry—such as Charles B. Harris’s exemplary reading of
Wallace’s relation to Barth—deepen our understanding of the writer’s
national reference points. ese two approaches, then, have provided what
we might think of as the generative axioms for some of the best Wallace
scholarship to date, yet at the same time these axioms also mark the
explanatory horizons of this approach to understanding of Wallace’s writing.
It may be, for instance, that Wallace’s intertextual compositional process
typically requires an appeal to an ancillary text, yet it has been rare for critics
to formalize their discussion of Wallace’s patch writing into a larger model of
cultural transmission. Equally, while we need to better understand Wallace’s
American engagements, we need to do so without effacing, for instance, his
fascination with Latin American writers, which stems back at least as far as
his seminal exposure to the Boom writers in Andrew Parker’s classes at
Amherst.
Part of the significance of Lucas ompson’s monograph precisely lies in
its axial reconsideration of these elements of Wallace studies. In addressing
Wallace’s varied revisionary strategies, ompson engages with and critiques
received models for cultural transmission—notably Harold Bloom’s map of
“enigmatic patterns” between poets8—while he also formulates Wallace’s
conception of literary influence in fluid terms that move across a sequence of
different analogies (the programmer, the holograph and so on) as the writer’s
career progressed. is framework allows him to offer a pioneering challenge
to the orthodox view of Wallace’s American genealogy, which is replaced by
the most expansive map to date of Wallace’s eclectic reading. e familiar
white male core of US postmodernism is convincingly supplemented by
both much richer accounts of literary ancestors that have been (in some
cases) only partially acknowledged (from Dostoevsky, through Kaa, to
Walker Percy), and by a sequence of unexpected names (from Jean Rhys to
Jamaica Kincaid). ompson’s approach is simultaneously centrifugal—
reaching out from Wallace’s texts to connect his writing to larger currents in
World Literary studies—and centripetal—probing into the core of Wallace’s
working procedures, especially as they are revealed by his archival materials.
In this latter respect, ompson seems to me to have examined the Harry
Ransom Center’s archive of Wallace’s paper in more detail than any other
critic, and I find it hard to imagine a serious Wallace reader who will not learn
something new about Wallace’s work from these pages. Indeed, while D.T.
8 Harold Bloom, e Anatomy of Influence (New Haven: Yale, 2011), 4.
Series Editor’s Introductionxii
Max’s indispensable Every Love Story is a Ghost Story (2012) has provided us
with the most extensive account of Wallace’s life that we currently have, it
necessarily did so in the typical mode of biography that privileges the
suffering man over the story of books such as Oblivion; ompson’s volume
might, on one level, be thought of as the counterpoint to Max’s project,
inasmuch as its exhaustive archival dimension restores the biography of the
books.
ere is still significant critical work to be done on Wallace’s American
genealogy,9 and perhaps such research might begin by trying to think beyond
the novel. For all the references Wallace made to Louise Glück and other
poets, for example, scholars have rarely explored the importance of poetry to
his work. Similarly, while Wallace described reading Donald Barthelme’s “e
Balloon” as a seminal moment in his growth as a writer, with few exceptions
(notable, albeit brief, comparisons by Mary K. Holland and Lee Konstantinou),
the duration of his relevance to Wallace’s growth has rarely been discussed.
How might the combination of adult and childlike perspectives in “Me and
Miss Mandible” map onto “e Soul is Not a Smithy”? How does Barthelme’s
use of just one side of an interview (the questioner’s) for part of “Kierkegaard
Unfair to Schlegel” relate to Wallace’s own interview- based narration? In
somewhat larger terms, Wallace’s place within writer networks might also
merit investigation, especially in relation to Somerville, Massachusetts, where
Wallace, Franzen, and Richard Powers all lived in the 1980s. Yet, as ompson
persuasively shows, this is only one part of Wallace’s story, and his fiction’s
scope needs to be rethought beyond national boundaries.
Global Wallace is, in my view, a fitting volume to open this series both
because of the way it enlarges our previously narrow understanding
of Wallace’s contexts, and because of the rigor and quality of its insights.
ose insights open up new avenues for investigation—I find myself
wondering, for instance, how Wallace’s interest in Craig Raine’s Haydn and
the Valve Trumpet (1990), for instance, might be read in dialogue with
Martian poetry and what Cioffi called Wallace’s tendency to “syntactically
reinvent . . . the English language”10—but they are also a timely companion to
our growing understanding of Wallace’s global influence. If ompson
demonstrates that Wallace drew on larger swathes of world culture than
readers have previously recognized, then it is also true that Wallace is himself
beginning to exert a more expansive influence beyond the boundaries of his
9 ompson, himself, has contributed to such work in his essay “ ‘Books are Made out of
Books’: David Foster Wallace and Cormac McCarthy,” Cormac McCarthy Journal 13
(2015): 3–26.
10 Cioffi, “ ‘An Anguish Become ing’: Narrative as Performance in David Foster Wallace’s
Infinite Jest,” Narrative 8 (2000): 162.
Series Editor’s Introduction xiii
Anglo-American readership. Wallace’s standing in Italy, for example, is
sufficiently strong to sustain the first journal issue devoted to exploring his
engagement with mathematics, and sufficiently widespread to prompt critics
to lament his influence on writers such as Alessandro Raveggi.11 Similarly,
growing interest in Finland has prompted the publication of an edited volume
titled Mitä David Foster Wallace Tarkoittaa? (What Does David Foster
Wallace Mean?).12 Readers in English—like those in other countries—are
themselves still coming to terms with what Wallace meant, but Global Wallace
reminds us that that meaning was constructed in far more extensive networks
than we’ve previously realized.
Spring 2016
Stephen J. Burn
11 Roberto Lucchetti and Roberto Natalini’s “David Foster Wallace e la Matematica”
appeared in Lettera Matematica Pristem, late in 2015; on Wallace’s influence on Italian
writers, see, for instance, Daniele Giglioli’s “Il Ragazzo Pesce e gli Autori Sommersi dal
Magistero di David Foster Wallace,” Il Corriere della Sera, January 20, 2013, 14.
12 Ville-Juhani Sutinen, ed., Mitä David Foster Wallace Tarkoittaa (Turku: Savukeidas,
2015).
Introduction. Wallace and the World
In many ways, David Foster Wallace was a profoundly American writer.
Indeed, it is difficult to think of another turn- of-the- century literary figure
who addressed American cultural concerns so overtly, nor one who so
deliberately signaled that his work was intended to be read along national
lines. Wallace spoke at length about the desire for his novels and short stories
to respond to a quintessentially American condition: He claimed to have
used his early fiction to map a particularly “American type of sadness,” stated
that his primary intention in 1996’s Infinite Jest was “to do something real
American, about what it’s like to live in America at the turn of the millennium,”
and conceived of e Pale King (2011) as an investigation into what America’s
taxation agency might reveal about the national character.1 Similarly, his
nonfiction oen explicitly addressed those psychological proclivities that
Wallace saw as endemic to the national character. ere are endless examples
of such statements from Wallace’s wide body of nonfiction: His 1992 review
of Tracy Austin’s tennis memoir, for instance, draws attention to “the
comparison- based achievement we Americans revere”; his 2001 address on
Franz Kaa discusses the comedic expectations of undergraduate students
whose “neural resonances are American”; and “Consider the Lobster” (2004)
characterizes the “pure late- date American” tourist experience as being “alien,
ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way
you can never admit.”2 Moreover, his 2003 essay on John McCain addresses “a
very modern and American type of [political] ambivalence,” and Brief
Interviews with Hideous Men (1999) addresses what Wallace saw as the
“spiritual emptiness of hetero- sexual interaction in post- modern America.”3
1 Laura Miller, “e Salon Interview: David Foster Wallace,” in Stephen J. Burn (ed.),
Conversations with David Foster Wallace (Jackson: e University Press of Mississippi), 59.
2 David Foster Wallace, “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart,” in Consider the Lobster (New
York: Little, Brown & Company, 2005), 142; Wallace, “Some Remarks on Kaa’s Funniness
from Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed,” in Consider the Lobster, 62;
Wallace, “Consider the Lobster,” in Consider the Lobster, 240.
3 Wallace, “Up, Simba,” in Consider the Lobster, 229; Lorin Stein, “David Foster Wallace:
In the Company of Creeps,” Publishers Weekly 245, no. 18, May 3, 1999. Online access:
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/print/19990503/21964-david- foster-wallace- in-the-
company-of- creeps.
Global Wallace2
Within his fiction, many of Wallace’s characters reach for similarly abstract
truths about national preoccupations and experiences. Steeply, from Infinite
Jest, describes the “genius” of the American social structure as centering
on the dictum that “each American seeking to pursue his maximum good
results in maximizing everyone’s good” (424), and e Pale King’s DeWitt
Glendenning claims that “Americans are in a way crazy. We infantilize
ourselves. We don’t think of ourselves as citizens—parts of something larger
to which we have profound responsibilities” (132). In the same vein, Skip
Atwater, the protagonist of the 2004 story “e Suffering Channel,” suggests
that “the great informing [drama] of the American psyche” is the “management
of insignificance” (284). Moreover, Wallace’s national focus was oen given
an extra layer of specificity, in his o- stated thesis that his own generation of
US citizens have an even narrower and more tightly focused subset of
concerns. Wallace claimed that the impetus behind Infinite Jest stemmed
from the realization that his own generation was experiencing “a very
American illness,” suggesting that “the idea of giving yourself away entirely to
the idea of working in order to achieve some sort of brass ring that usually
involves people feeling some way about you.”4 His characterization of “sub-
40” Americans in his 1997 review of John Updike’s Toward the End of Time is
even more specific about the particular problems besetting his own
generation, with Wallace noting that “[t]oday’s sub-40s have different horrors,
prominent among which are anomie and solipsism and a peculiarly American
loneliness: the prospect of dying without once having loved something more
than yourself.”5 ese examples, taken from across Wallace’s career, form a
small sample of his views on what he took to be the uniquely troubling
aspects of being an American. ey are indicative of both the depth of
Wallace’s engagement with US culture and of his strategic attempts to dictate
the terms of his own reception, by signaling his own contributions to a
national conversation.
Since Wallace’s critique of late- capitalist US culture is so clearly visible
throughout his work, both scholarly and nonscholarly readers alike have
sought to position Wallace as an archetypally American figure. Indeed, his
work ostensibly fulfills William Dean Howells’s famous exhortation to US
writers, to focus on intrinsically American themes and thereby find the
originality and singular “distinction” of American life. “I would have our
American novelists be as American as they unconsciously can,” Howells
4 Laura Miller, “e Salon Interview: David Foster Wallace,” 64.
5 David Foster Wallace, “Certainly the End of Something or Other, One Would Sort of Have
to ink,” in Consider the Lobster, 54. My emphasis.
Introduction 3
proclaimed in an 1891 essay, arguing that though Matthew Arnold had found
nothing particularly noteworthy about American life, this erroneous
assessment should encourage novelists to prove the great poet (and other
naysayers) wrong:
Matthew Arnold complained that he found no “distinction” in our
life, and I would gladly persuade all artists intending greatness in
any kind among us that the recognition of the fact pointed out by
Mr. Arnold ought to be a source of inspiration to them, and not
discouragement.6
In fact, Wallace is frequently positioned as an exceptionally incisive interpreter
of American culture, the preeminent representative of his literary generation.
Steven Moore argues that Wallace’s lexical brilliance allowed him to capture
“the way modern America sounds in all its cacophony better than any of his
contemporaries”; Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly argue that his
writing catalogues myriad forms of “modern American lostness”; and
Stephen J. Burn positions Wallace as “arguably the most intellectually- gied
American writer of his generation,” a writer whose “prose range was
unparalleled.”7 Even more forceful is Burn’s later assertion that “Wallace was,
in a non- trivial sense, an American writer—engaged with the cultural, social,
and political issues thrown up by his nation state—and his artistic inheritance
draws heavily on American arts.”8 As these examples reveal, the overwhelming
critical impulse has been to restrict interpretations of Wallace’s fiction to a
narrow, American context, within what Rémy Marathe, in Infinite Jest,
describes as the “walled nation” (127) of the United States. Biographer D.T.
Max is similarly concerned with emphasizing the particularly American
aspects of Wallace’s artistic project, interpreting his work with exclusive
reference to the US postmodern literary tradition. Perhaps most tellingly,
Don DeLillo, himself a significant influence on Wallace’s career, described
the younger writer’s style as embodying the very adjective American,
concluding his 2007 memorial tribute with: “Youth and loss. at is Dave’s
6 William Dean Howells, Criticism and Fiction (London: McIlvaine & Co., 1891), 138–39.
7 Steven Moore, “In Memoriam David Foster Wallace,” Modernism/Modernity 16, no. 1
(2009): 2; Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly, “David Foster Wallace’s Nihilism,” in
All ings Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age (New
York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 27; Stephen J. Burn, “Infinite Jest and the Twentieth
Century: David Foster Wallace’s Legacy,” in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest: A Reader’s
Guide. Second Edition (New York: Continuum, 2012), 18.
8 Stephen J. Burn, Introduction to Conversations with David Foster Wallace, xii.
Global Wallace4
voice, American.”9 is latter comment shows the Wallace- as-national-
metonym interpretation at its purest, though many scholars have made
similarly territorial claims, positioning his work as the apogee of a particularly
American brand of culturally incisive, ambitious literature, and tracing its
diffuse legacy within contemporary US fiction. Burn, for instance, suggests
that Wallace’s legacy exerts considerable force on current American literary
trends, arguing that “[d]espite only publishing two novels, the imprint of
[his] fiction nevertheless circulates through the bloodstream of American
fiction.”10 Wallace’s frequent pronouncements on the state of contemporary
US literature invite such interpretations, and many scholarly readings have
hewn closely to Wallace’s own conception of his work, focusing on connections
between Wallace and an earlier generation of postmodernists, and revealing
his many important interventions within the American postmodern
tradition.
e predominately American focus surrounding Wallace’s reception is
thus, in some ways, a natural extension of the recurring themes within his
work. Along with the many explicit references to US culture detailed above,
Wallace oen focused on particularly American phenomena: e rapidly
changing American media landscape, hyper- consumerism, advertising, US
sports, entertainment, and politics are all recurring interests throughout his
fiction and journalism. It is also the case that Wallace’s narratives are
invariably set in geographically specific American locations. Indeed, Lee
Konstantinou points out that across Wallace’s career, his fictional settings
became increasingly US-centric, with the posthumously published novel e
Pale King being “even more inward- looking that its predecessors,” making
“little reference to anything outside the territorial boundaries of the United
States.”11 Moreover, Wallace was deeply familiar with an enormous range of
American literary texts, with much of this reading informing the way he
taught American literature to undergraduates at Amherst College, Illinois
State University, and Pomona College. But though the widespread emphasis
on Wallace as a quintessentially American figure has some justification, the
argument of this book is that such obvious American investments have
9 Don DeLillo, “Informal Remarks from the David Foster Wallace Memorial Service in
New York on October 23, 2008,” in e Legacy of David Foster Wallace, eds. Samuel
Cohen and Lee Konstantinou (Iowa City: e University of Iowa Press, 2012), 24.
10 Stephen J. Burn, “Infinite Jest and the Twentieth Century: David Foster Wallace’s Legacy,”
Modernism/Modernity 16, no. 1 (2009): 12.
11 Lee Konstantinou, “e World of David Foster Wallace,” boundary 2 40, no. 3 (2013):
9–10.
Introduction 5
obscured the more oblique, though equally important, global dimensions of
Wallace’s work.
My claim is that alongside Wallace’s primary focus on American themes
and his ongoing conversation with “the early [American] postmodern writers
of the fiies and sixties,” there is also a more subtle, international literary
exchange taking place in his work.12 e more counter- intuitive—and
partially occluded—aspect of Wallace’s intellectual life was his profound
engagement with a diverse body of world literature, with those texts that, in
David Damrosch’s phrase, “circulate beyond their culture of origin.”13 is
engagement can be traced back to Wallace’s years at the University of Arizona’s
creative writing department, where he railed against the widespread MFA
emphasis on studying—and ultimately learning to write within—a particular
tradition of American literature. Mark McGurl’s e Program Era (2009),
which positions creative writing institutions as “the sine qua non of post- war
literary production,” attests to the narrowly American focus of creative
writing programs, and of their frequent status “as shrines to vivacious
American individualism.”14 For Wallace, such a rigidly nationalistic focus was
disabling and unnecessarily limited. In a later interview, he emphasized the
program’s narrow, parochial approach to literature:
One of my big complaints about Arizona was that though I liked a lot of
the students, and I liked a lot of the regular faculty, I didn’t much like the
creative writing faculty. ey really disparaged the idea of learning how
to write as part of learning how to take part in the tradition of Western
letters.15
Wallace’s assessment resonates with similarly disparaging and provocative
comments from Horace Engdahl, who in his 2008 role as permanent secretary
of the Swedish Academy addressed the long absence of US Nobel Prize
laureates by suggesting that
Europe still is the center of the literary world . . . not the United States. . . .
e US is too isolated, too insular. ey don’t translate enough and don’t
12 Larry McCaffery, “An Expanded Interview with David Foster Wallace,” in Conversations
with Wallace, 24.
13 David Damrosch, What is World Literature? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2003), 4.
14 Mark McGurl, e Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 368, 255.
15 Hugh Kennedy and Geoffrey Polk, “Looking for a Garde of Which to Be Avant:
An Interview with David Foster Wallace,” in Conversations with David Foster Wallace, 15.
Global Wallace6
really participate in the big dialogue of literature. at ignorance is
restraining.16
Although Wallace might have taken issue with Engdahl’s pejorative
assessment, there is a crucial sense in which his own experience in graduate
school prompted him to renounce a constrictingly nationalistic idea of
fiction, in the attempt to “participate in the big dialogue of literature.”
In “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young” (1988), Wallace
echoed these sentiments, bemoaning the fact that, for most institutionalized
creative writing students, international classics such as those written by
“Homer and Milton, Cervantes and Shakespeare, Maupassant and Gogol—
to say nothing of the Testaments—have receded into the mists of Straight
Lit,” while aspiring young writers labor under the delusion that “Salinger
invented the wheel, Updike internal combustion, and Carver, Beattie and
Phillips drive what’s worth chasing.”17 (His rancor toward MFA programs
was also given expression in his irreverent renaming of the creative writing
degree, in 1996, as a “master of flatulent arts,” and in the parodic newsletter
Wallace distributed while studying at what he and a friend rechristened as
the “University of Aridzona Piety Center.”18) Alluding to T.S. Eliot’s eccentric
account of literary progression in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,”
Wallace’s essay goes on to indict the ideological underpinnings of the MFA
for its narrowness and ahistoricity, accusing it of promoting a reductive view
of literature as limited to a sociocultural “Now.” His primary concern is that
[w]e as a generation are in danger of justifying Eliot at his zaniest if via a
blend of academic stasis and intellectual disinterest we show to the
dissatisfaction of all that culture is either cumulative or is dead, empty on
either side of a social Now that admits neither passion about the future
nor curiosity about the past.
(62)
16 Quoted in Charles McGrath, “Lost in Translation? A Swede’s Snub of U.S. Lit,” New
York Times, October 4, 2008. Online access: nytimes.com/2008/10/05/weekinreview/
05mcgrath.html.
17 David Foster Wallace, “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young,” in Both Flesh
and Not: Essays (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 2012), 62.
18 Frank Bruni, “e Grunge American Novel,” New York Times, March 24, 1996; D.T. Max,
Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (New York: Penguin,
2013), 72. Wallace’s 1998 piece, “e Flexicon” also contains a scathing assessment of
“Graduate Creative Writing Departments.” Wallace, “e Flexicon,” Parnassus: Poetry in
Review 23, no. 1 (1998): 185.
Introduction 7
Wallace’s analysis here preempts a later critique in “Westward the Course of
Empire Takes Its Way,” which rails against “a generation whose eyes have
moved fish- like to the sides of its head, forward vision usurped by a numb
need to survive the now.”19 He thus reprises the recurring postmodern
argument about having crossed a historical threshold, though his primary
concern is with the impact that this historical broach will have on literature.
Wallace thus surely encountered, in this institutional perpetuation of
American fiction, the kind of national rigidity that Wai Chee Dimock
describes as the reflexivity and “self- eviden[ce]” of American letters: “nowhere
is the adjective American more secure,” Dimock contends, “than when it is
offered as American literature; nowhere is it more naturalized, more reflexively
affirmed as inviolate.”20 Wallace’s response also aligns with the career- defining
realization of an American figure from an earlier generation, Susan Sontag,
who characterized world literature in similar terms, as a necessary antidote to
“provincialism” and “inane schooling”:
To have access to literature, world literature, was to escape the prison of
national vanity, of philistinism, of compulsory provincialism, of inane
schooling, of imperfect destinies and bad luck. Literature was the
passport to enter a large life; that is, the zone of freedom.21
Shortly aer completing his MFA, Wallace’s interviews and journalism took
on a correspondingly international dimension: In a 1993 interview, for
instance, he claimed to be “the only ’postmodernist’ you’ll ever meet who
absolutely worships Leo Tolstoy,” while from 1994 onward, he began
conceiving of Fyodor Dostoevsky as a crucial “model” in the attempt to
heighten the ethical force of his own fiction.22 It is clear that in the years
following his MFA at Arizona, Wallace thus distanced himself from an
emphasis—within not only creative writing programs, but also within
American literary culture more generally—on twentieth- century US fiction,
19 David Foster Wallace, “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way,” in Girl with
Curious Hair (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1989), 304.
20 Wai Chee Dimock, “Scales of Aggregation: Prenational, Subnational, Transnational,”
American Literary History 18, no. 2 (2006): 223.
21 Susan Sontag, “Literature is Freedom,” in At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches (New
York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007), 207.
22 Hugh Kennedy and Geoffrey Polk, “Looking for a Garde of Which to Be Avant: An
Interview with David Foster Wallace,” 19; David Foster Wallace, “Joseph Frank’s
Dostoevsky,” in Consider the Lobster, 274.
Global Wallace8
in the attempt to participate within a more expansive, international literary
tradition.
Although Wallace’s specific reference is to “the tradition of Western letters,”
in reality, his newfound commitment to extramural fiction encompassed
many global traditions. ere are countless ways in which Wallace engaged
with a radically expanded notion of literature aer this early moment of
realization. He read and taught numerous translated texts, reviewed and wrote
on many of these same works, and—as I argue throughout this book—
incorporated the ideas, themes, and stylistic devices of numerous international
figures within his own fiction. Moreover, from a wide body of evidence—
within the archived collection of his personal library, allusions within his
fiction, and various interviews—we know that Wallace read and engaged with
an enormous amount of world literature. Specifically, he was familiar with a
wide range of French writers (including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jacques
Roubaud, Jean-Paul Sartre, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Albert Camus, Blaise Pascal,
Guy de Maupassant, Stendhal, Francis Picabia, Rabelais, Andre Gide, in
addition to theorists such as Barthes, Foucault, Lacan, and Derrida), as well as
a diverse collection of Latin American fiction and poetry (including the work
of Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Gabriel García Márquez, Manuel Puig, Jorge
Luis Borges, Carlos Fuentes, José Donoso, Octavio Paz, and Julio Cortázar). He
was also particularly taken with German- language writers (among them
omas Mann, Franz Kaa, Bertolt Brecht, Robert Musil, Peter Handke, Hans
Robert Jauss, Goethe, Rainer Maria Rilke, Arno Gruen, Günther Grass, Max
Frisch, Jürg Federspeil, Siegfried Kracauer, Viktor Frankl, and Alice Miller),
various Eastern European figures (Emil Cioran, Jerzy Kosinski, Milan Kundera,
Bruno Schulz, Joseph Conrad, Witold Gombrowicz, Zbigniew Herbert, and
Henryk Sienkiwicz, among others), and was enamored with a diverse group
of nineteenth- and early- twentieth- century Russian authors (predominately
Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, but also Nikolai Gogol, Anton Chekhov, Ivan
Turgenev, Alexander Pushkin, Ivan Goncharov, Daniil Kharms, and other
twentieth- century Russian absurdists). In addition, and perhaps even more
unexpectedly, Wallace was familiar with some Italian literature (in 2006, he
claimed that Italo Calvino was his “favorite Italian,” adding that he “re- read
Calvino a lot”), Japanese fiction (Wallace read Banana Yoshimoto’s Kitchen,
Yukio Mushima’s e Sailor who fell from Grace with the Sea, Yasunari
Kawabata’s Palm- of-the-Hand Stories, and took a Japanese history course
at Amherst titled “History 48—Japan since 1800”), Dutch authors Cees
Noteboom and Philibert Schogt, Greek novelist Apostolos Doxiadis, as well as
several international authors whose national affiliations encompass multiple
territories, such as J.M. Coetzee, Peter Carey, and Christina Stead. Moreover, in
his role as Associate Editor for Dalkey Archive’s e Review of Contemporary
Introduction 9
Fiction during his time at Illinois State University, Wallace edited a vast number
of international short stories, smoothing English translations and enhancing
their readability for an American audience. In this role, he worked on special
issues devoted to Danish, Finnish, and Latvian fiction, many of whose stories
he annotated extensively. His personal library at the Harry Ransom Center
also holds relatively obscure medieval literary titles, such as the middle-English
romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the French medieval text
Yawain: the Knight and the Lion.23 While this dizzying list includes widely
read, hypercanonical figures such as Goethe, Tolstoy, and Borges, it also
includes many writers who, in Damrosch’s terms, produce “counter- canon”
and “shadow canon” texts, those texts that comprise “the subaltern and
contestatory voices of writers in less- commonly taught languages and in
minor literatures within great- power languages.”24 Although many other major
American authors would doubtless be familiar with a number of figures
from this list, what is notable in Wallace’s case is the sheer diversity of
his literary engagements, which encompass numerous continents, genres,
historical periods, and languages. is extensive collection of authors and
texts, along with his profound debts to many of these figures, prompts us to
reconsider the prevailing interpretation of Wallace’s work in exclusively
American terms, along with the oen unconscious aligning of his work within
a national framework. What becomes apparent from such a study is the vast
range of Wallace’s artistic debts, as well as the sense in which he belongs to a
particular strain of avant- garde, intellectually cosmopolitan fiction. As Daniel
Medin has argued with regard to contemporaneous figures such as J.M.
Coetzee and W.G. Sebald, my claim is that Wallace belongs to a group of
postmodern authors “for whom immersion in others’ fiction has always been
crucial to the creation of their own.”25
One possible reason why scholars have not, by and large, made these
kinds of artistic connections is that while Wallace was relatively candid about
his appropriation of American sources—the colophon in Girl with Curious
Hair (1989), for instance, lists Cynthia Ozick’s Bloodshed and ree Novellas,
23 Arnaldo Greco, “Breve Intervista con un Uomo Meravigioloso,” la Repubblica, December
18 (2010): 98. My translation. Online access: http://periodici.repubblica.it/d/. ough it
was published posthumously, the interview took place in 2006.
24 David Damrosch, “World Literature in a Postcanonical, Hypercanonical Age,” in
Comparative Literature in the Age of Globalization, ed. Haun Saussy (Baltimore: e
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 45.
25 Daniel L. Medin, ree Sons: Franz Kaa and the Fiction of J.M. Coetzee, Philip Roth, and
W.G. Sebald (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010), 14.
Global Wallace10
John Ashbery’s “Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” and John Barth’s “Lost in
the Funhouse” as key intertexts—he was oen less forthcoming about
his debts to international authors. Moreover, his references to American
figures are oen fairly heavy- handed: e Eschaton scene in Infinite Jest, for
instance, bears an obvious resemblance to DeLillo’s End Zone (1972), while
Wallace even duplicates a character’s name—Jethro Bodine—from Pynchon’s
Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). Many of these latter references function primarily
in situating the novel in relation to a pre- existing body of literature, signaling
to the reader that Infinite Jest should be read as self- consciously participating
within the tradition of American postmodern fiction. Moreover, Wallace’s
intertextual citations became considerably more opaque in the years
following the publication of Girl with Curious Hair. D.T. Max notes that
editors at Viking Penguin, fearing the possibility of legal ramifications arising
from several stories, asked Wallace to come clean on every source and real-
life referent informing the collection, a demand that Gerry Howard, Wallace’s
then editor, described as “the literary equivalent of a strip search . . . ‘Spread
’em.’ ”26 During this process, Wallace revealed several submerged intertexts,
admitting that Susan St. James’s 1986 interview with David Letterman was
the inspiration for “My Appearance,” that John Updike was being indirectly
invoked in “Little Expressionless Animals,” and that Kierkegaard was a crucial
presence in “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way.” Despite his
cerebral defense, that these hitherto unacknowledged sources constituted a
kind of “postmodern prank” (107), Wallace learned an important lesson
through the experience, and took care to conceal some of his more obvious
artistic debts in later fiction. Moreover, if Tore Rye Anderson’s assertion—
that Wallace’s dust- jackets of novels constitute important paratexts that are a
“decisive factor in the reception’s construction of the work”—is correct, then
the frequent US-centric comparisons that ensconce Wallace’s texts may also
have contributed to the nationalistic interpretive discourse surrounding his
work.27 e blurbs used on the cover of e Broom of the System (1987), for
instance, list usual suspects such as Barth, Barthelme, Gass, and Gaddis as
crucial points of reference, while the blurbs and jacket copy included on the
first edition of Infinite Jest invoke John Irving, Tom Robbins, and William
Burroughs. Significantly, Little Brown & Co. also included a jacket- copy
description of the book that is framed in explicitly American terms, describing
Infinite Jest as “a gargantuan, mind- altering comedy about the pursuit of
26 Max, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, 107.
27 Tore Rye Anderson, “Judging by the Cover,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 53,
no. 3 (2012): 271.
Introduction 11
happiness in America.”28 Such extratextual material has doubtless played an
important role in Wallace’s reception, situating his work within a readily
identifiable tradition of American literature, and deflecting both scholarly
and public attention away from the complex engagements with global texts
that lie beneath so much of Wallace’s fiction and nonfiction.
is book sets forth a revisionist account of Wallace’s work, moving the
neglected and overlooked global aspects of his fiction into the spotlight.
It should be noted, however, that such an analysis does not by any means
invalidate the prevailing tendency to read Wallace in localized or nationalist
terms. As I have shown, there is ample justification for conceiving of Wallace
as a particularly incisive respondent to US culture, and for viewing his project
as a response to various American literary and intellectual traditions. Instead,
this study demonstrates that a more nuanced account of Wallace’s myriad
transnational engagements opens up complementary ways of reading his vast
body of work, providing alternate points of entry and generating unexpected
interpretations and perspectives. An analogous body of criticism, in this
regard, are the recent accounts of such canonical authors as Jane Austen,
Emily Dickinson, and Virginia Woolf, all of whom have historically been
interpreted in rigidly nationalistic terms, but whose work has in recent years
been broadened through various comparative and transnational readings.29
is book therefore aligns with a broader scholarly agenda, concerned with
critiquing the localized investments that shape the way particular figures are
read. Milan Kundera’s distinction, in “Die Weltliteratur,” between the small
context and the large context is a simple one, but useful nonetheless. Kundera
argues that there “are two basic contexts in which a work of art may be placed:
either in the history of its nation (we can call this the small context) or else in
the supranational history of its art (the large context).”30 While this book is
intended as a disruptive gesture, dislodging Wallace from a particular strain
of national, patriotic criticism, and instead, locating his work within the
expanded, large context that Kundera has in mind, it is misleading to think
of the two frames as a simple binary. is is because an interpretation centered
28 Infinite Jest first- edition jacket copy.
29 See, for instance, Anthony Mandal and Brian Southam, eds., e Reception of Jane Austen
in Europe (London: Continuum, 2007); Paul Giles, “ ‘e Earth reversed her Hemispheres’:
Dickinson’s Antipodality,” in Antipodean America (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2013), 189–207; Rebecca L. Walkowitz, “For Translation: Virginia Woolf, J.M. Coetzee
and Transnational Comparison,” in David James, ed., e Legacies of Modernism:
Historicizing Postwar and Contemporary Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2011), 243–63.
30 Milan Kundera, e Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts, trans. Linda Asher (London: Faber
& Faber, 2007), 39.
Global Wallace12
on Wallace and world literature ultimately feeds back into his incisive cultural
analyses, refining our understanding of Wallace’s unusual perspective on US
culture and politics. As I will argue, the practice of engaging with various
translated works gave Wallace—among other things—an estranged position
from which to perceive his native culture, a means by which to sidestep his
own investment within American systems and structures, and instead, view
them from unexpected vantage points. Ultimately, paying close attention to
Wallace’s engagement with a more expansive cluster of influences sheds new
light on the career- long engagement with the United States that other scholars
have perceived in his work.
Part of this broadening project has already begun in the work of other
academics. Timothy Jacobs, for instance, has positioned Wallace as self-
consciously extending the artistic legacy of such diverse writers as Gerard
Manley Hopkins, Stendhal, and Dostoevsky; Toon Staes has offered an
insightful reading of Wallace’s relation to Franz Kaa; and Paul Giles has
shown how Wallace’s work engages with the conceptual space of Australasia,
arguing that Wallace’s short story “B.I. #48” deploys a particular notion of
Antipodean ontology as a means by which to enact a “severe deconstruction
and demystification of the liberal humanist tradition of American romance.”31
Moreover, other scholars have shown that Wallace’s work engages with
various British literary figures (such as James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and
Philip Larkin), while Wallace’s relation to a wide variety of continental
philosophers and novelists (Derrida, Nietzsche, Lacan, Berkeley, Kierkegaard,
Sartre, Camus, Bakhtin, Wittgenstein, and Balzac, among others) has also
been mapped out. My project therefore fits within a subset of Wallace
scholarship that has sought to account for such diverse connections, though
it also unifies what are oen artificially disparate strands of criticism. Aiming
to provide a more comprehensive account of the way that Wallace engaged
with global sources, the book provides a rigorous framework with which to
explore these and many other influences, synthesizing the comparative work
that has already begun in order to make broader claims about the consistent
31 Paul Giles, Antipodean America: Australasia and the Constitution of U.S. Literature
(London: Oxford University Press, 2013), 449. See Timothy Jacobs, “American
Touchstone: e Idea of Order in Gerard Manly Hopkins and David Foster Wallace,”
Comparative Literature Studies 38, no. 3 (2001): 215–31; Timothy Jacobs,” e Brothers
Incandenza: Translating Ideology in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s e Brothers Karamazov and
David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 49, no. 3
(2007): 265–92; Toon Staes, “ ‘Only Artists can Transfigure’: Kaa’s Artists and the
Possibility of Redemption in the Novellas of David Foster Wallace,” Orbis Literrarum 65,
no. 6 (2010): 459–80.
Introduction 13
presence of global texts within Wallace’s fiction. By emphasizing numerous
international artistic influences, many of which have not yet been examined,
my aim is to enlarge the critical discussion of Wallace’s artistic precedents.
In arguing for Wallace’s significant engagement with the field of world
literature, and in accounting for his transposition of world sources, it is also
important to register the many complexities that positioning Wallace as a
transnational figure entail. It is crucial to note, for instance, that Wallace was
a highly unorthodox reader of world literature, invariably engaging with
transnational texts in ways that are at odds with contemporary scholars’
accounts of appropriate reading practices. Damrosch’s articulation of two
dominant approaches to the study of world literature, “exoticism and
assimilation” (13), is productive in understanding Wallace’s reading practice.
In What is World Literature? (2003), Damrosch suggests that
[f]rom Henry Cabot Lodge and Charles Eliot to the HarperCollins and
Norton anthologies, world literature has oscillated between extremes of
assimilation and discontinuity: either the earlier and distant works
reflect a consciousness just like ours, or they are unutterably alien,
curiosities whose foreignness finally tells us nothing and can only
reinforce our sense of separate identity.32
It is not difficult to argue that Wallace is invariably located firmly in the
former category, with much of his reading based on assumptions of
commonality and comparable experience. His engagements with world
literature thus tended to reinforce his own cultural and historical perspective,
in what Damrosch would deride as “a self- centered construction of the world”
(133). Wallace’s reading of Dostoevsky, for instance, is overwhelmingly
concerned with discerning links between nineteenth- century Russian culture
and his own. Here, Wallace equates Russia’s nascent materialism and
selfishness with late- capitalist consumerism, connects the “ideological
Nihilists of Dostoevsky’s time” with the postmodern literary nihilists of the
1990s, and suggests that critical theory—and deconstruction in particular—
is the modern version of the uncritical devotion to Socialist ideology present
in Dostoevsky’s Russia. In a similar vein, Wallace’s account of Borges is
obsessed with making connections between Borges’s Argentina and his own
understanding of North America. Wallace wrote “much like U.S.” next to a
number of Borges quotations, including one on the national character of
32 David Damrosch, What is World Literature? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2003), 133. Damrosch’s emphasis.
Global Wallace14
Argentina, while he also reimagined the short story “e Writing of the God”
as a parable of American solipsism.33 In addition, Wallace read Kaa for his
relevance to what he perceived as an impoverished understanding of
American selood, and approached Argentine novelist Manuel Puig almost
exclusively in stylistic terms, ignoring many of the cultural and historical
particularities within Puig’s work.
us, while Wallace’s readings avoid falling into exoticist traps, in
which foreign texts are assumed to be fundamentally unreachable and
unrecognizable in any respect, his readings are oen situated in the opposing
half of Damrosch’s dialectic, perpetuating a form of cross- cultural reading
based on unjustifiable assumptions of similarity, an interpretive approach
that is too eager to draw direct comparisons. Instead of acknowledging the
fundamental alterity of such global, culturally dissimilar texts, his reading
oen “leaps, Superman- style, over wide geographies and long histories” to
find signs of the “reassuring sameness” that Vilashini Cooppan and others
critique.34 However, while Wallace’s approach may be out of step with current
scholarly models, it also proved highly pragmatic and productive in terms of
his own work: his overwhelmingly US-centric strategy gave him the freedom
to appropriate from a diverse global canon, allowing him to construct fiction
from a radically expanded set of artistic sources. Like Goethe himself, whose
shrewd readings of global texts were always motivated by artistic needs,
focusing on what he could transpose within his own work, Wallace’s primary
focus was always on potential sources of artistic appropriation.
In addition to Wallace’s unorthodox encounters with a world canon, there
are also several biographical oddities worth mentioning, which likewise
render a reading of Wallace as a particularly engaged respondent to world
literature more problematic. As previously noted, Wallace’s narratives are
located, almost without exception, within specific American locations;
his fiction lacks the cosmopolitanism and internationalist scope of other
contemporary US writers, such as Robert Stone, Norman Rush, Philip
Caputo, and Neal Stephenson. Indeed, his characters rarely if ever move
beyond the confines of their own narrow cultural sphere. Moreover, his
correspondence to various translators of his work evinces a skepticism toward
both the general notion of translation as well as the idea that his work could
be culturally transposed at all. Although he was fascinated with the mechanics
33 David Foster Wallace, Annotations in Edwin Williamson’s Borges: A Life. David Foster
Wallace Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.
34 Vilashini Cooppan, “e Ethics of World Literature: Reading Others, Reading Otherwise,”
in David Damrosch (ed.) Teaching World Literature (New York: e Modern Language
Association of America, 2009), 38.
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