Course: David Foster Wallace: Literature and Philosophy

Consider the Lobster, by David Foster Wallace Gourmet Magazine, Originally Published August 2004 http://www.gourmet.com/magazine/2000s/2004/08/consider_the_lobster For 56 years, the Maine Lobster Festival has been drawing crowds with the promise of sun, …

The other essential piece of context for understanding Wallace is postmodernism. Postmodernism means many things but there are two main aspects of it to grasp to understand Wallace. First, Wallace …

Hal is here lying down in the tennis academy TV room. Stice is another student at the tennis academy. ‘Himself’ is Hal’s father. It now lately sometimes seemed like a …

Kierkegaard on irony Kierkegaard finds in Socrates two types of irony corresponding to two types of dialectic. The first type of irony is a stimulus to thought, corresponding to dialectic …

Irony and the Self: philosophical intertextuality Kierkegaard described the irony he was interested in as a ‘qualification of subjectivity’ (in contrast to, say, verbal games or dramatic irony). Irony in …

Hal and Hamlet: literary intertextuality The parallels between the novel and Hamlet are numerous (for example Poor Yorick is the name of Hal’s father’s film company; Hal has a dead …

In this extract, the narrator explores the process of rehabilitation from addiction through the eyes of Don Gately, one of the novel‘s primary characters. Don Gately is a former thief …

These questions are about the world of the novel but simultaneously about our own society. Although it is interesting to think about these questions in the context of the novel, …

What are the connections to freedom raised in the previous extract? Freedom here involves placing your trust in the viability of following rules, which are proven to work contrary to …

Marathe and Steeply extract In this extract, Marathe, a member of a Québecois separatist group, the A.F.R. (who are wheelchair assassins), converses with an American FBI agent, Hugh Steeply (who …

If you have enjoyed Wallace and want to explore further, here are our suggestions for the best places to start. If you want to read Wallace’s own work, his magnum …

Genre ‘Octet’ has no defined genre. At the start of ‘Pop Quiz 9’ Wallace says he intends it to be a ‘cycle’ of ‘belletristic pieces’ (that is, an artistic piece …

When considering the place of the author in contemporary society, we could posit a spectrum between metafiction on the one hand, with its self-reflexivity and playfulness and the consequent impossibility …

[NB The original story has long footnotes that cover multiple pages but this is confusing to read in a single scrolling article. We have therefore italicised the footnotes to make …

In the next step, you’ll read the commencement address Wallace gave at Kenyon College in 2005. Think about the following questions as you read ‘This is Water’. How does Foster …