Countless contemporary writers have been influenced by Infinite Jest, including Jonathan Franzen, Zadie Smith, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Dave Eggers, and Ben Lerner. Another earlier work that shares Infinite Jest’s suspicion of how drugs and entertainment sedate a population is Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), although Huxley arguably has a more clear, didactic position on these issues than Wallace, who is more ambivalent. An earlier predecessor of both Gravity’s Rainbow and Infinite Jest is James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), which set a precedent for very long, difficult, and experimental fiction at the beginning of the 20th century. The novel to which Infinite Jest is most frequently compared is Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), which as well as being long and encyclopedic with a circular plot structure and multiple internal narratives, also explores similar themes of technology, high and low culture, free will, sex, and drugs. His final novel, The Pale King, was published posthumously in 2011. Throughout his career Wallace published short stories and nonfiction, including the now famous essays “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” and “Consider the Lobster.” In addition to substance abuse issues, Wallace suffered from depression for almost all of his adult life, and in 2008 he killed himself. Wallace published Infinite Jest in 1996 and was awarded the MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship the following year. During the on/off relationship that ensued, he was physically violent. In the early 1990s he became obsessed with the writer Mary Karr, stalking her and threatening to kill her husband. He taught English and creative writing at Emerson College, Illinois State University, and Pomona College. In 1989 he spent four months going through drug and alcohol detox at a psychiatric hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts. It was also around this time that Wallace began writing Infinite Jest. That year he enrolled in the philosophy PhD program at Harvard, but soon dropped out. He was a joint major in English and philosophy at Amherst College, and his senior honors thesis for English became his first novel, The Broom in the System, which was published in 1987, the same year he graduated from the MFA program in creative writing from the University of Arizona. Like several of the characters in Infinite Jest, he was a competitive junior tennis player.
David Foster Wallace was the child of two professors who grew up in Illinois.
0 kommentar(er)
