Book contents
- David Foster Wallace in Context
- David Foster Wallace in Context
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I Contexts
- Part II Ideas
- Part III Bodies
- Part IV Systems
- Chapter 26 Infinite Jest as Opiate Fiction
- Chapter 27 David Foster Wallace and Racial Capitalism
- Chapter 28 Language and Self-Creation
- Chapter 29 Very Old Land
- Chapter 30 David Foster Wallace’s Ecologies
- Chapter 31 “I Could, If You’d Let Me, Talk and Talk”
- Chapter 32 David and Dutch
- Chapter 33 David Foster Wallace and Publishing
- Chapter 34 Author Here, There and Everywhere
- Works by David Foster Wallace
- Bibliography of Secondary Sources
- Index
Chapter 29 - Very Old Land
David Foster Wallace and the Myths and Systems of Agriculture
from Part IV - Systems
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 November 2022
- David Foster Wallace in Context
- David Foster Wallace in Context
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I Contexts
- Part II Ideas
- Part III Bodies
- Part IV Systems
- Chapter 26 Infinite Jest as Opiate Fiction
- Chapter 27 David Foster Wallace and Racial Capitalism
- Chapter 28 Language and Self-Creation
- Chapter 29 Very Old Land
- Chapter 30 David Foster Wallace’s Ecologies
- Chapter 31 “I Could, If You’d Let Me, Talk and Talk”
- Chapter 32 David and Dutch
- Chapter 33 David Foster Wallace and Publishing
- Chapter 34 Author Here, There and Everywhere
- Works by David Foster Wallace
- Bibliography of Secondary Sources
- Index
Summary
Hal Incandenza, early in Infinite Jest, has a dream of a tennis court that is dauntingly “complex,” with “lines going every which way, and they run oblique or meet and form relationships and boxes and rivers and tributaries and systems inside systems.” Among other meanings, this court is an image of Wallace’s complex narratives themselves, landscapes that juxtapose the regulating and other effects of systems of information, computing, government, ecology and more. This essay attempts to ground Wallace’s corpus in the systems novel, a category applied by critic Tom LeClair to the postmodern novelists that most inspired him, including Thomas Pynchon, Joseph McElroy and William Gaddis. The essay will focus its readings on Wallace’s last two novels, Infinite Jest and The Pale King, and draw briefly on archival evidence at the Ransom Center that Wallace learned much about the systems novel’s grand ambitions from not just Don DeLillo’s works but the discussion of Gregory Bateson and other systems theorists in LeClair’s In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- David Foster Wallace in Context , pp. 314 - 324Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022