Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

BASE CAMP

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

"How is there freedom to choose if one does not learn how to choose?"

This huge tour-de-force by a master scrivener begins with a college admissions interview that goes terrifically off the rails. A cast of hundreds, multiple locations, and strange juxtapositions populate the thousand-plus pages of Wallace’s last completed novel-length work. Come along as we prepare to climb some of literary fiction’s tallest peaks.

Here at base camp we will:

1. Explore the four distinct plot threads in Wallace’s work (Tennis Academy hijinks, International Terrorist Plot, Life at a Drug Rehabilitation Center, and the mysterious and deadly independent film at the heart of it all).
2. Discuss a collective of post-modern themes (addiction and recovery, security and freedom, free will and responsibility, the nature and role of art in society, and the ecstasy and agony of familial relationships).
3. Discover literary allusions from Homer’s "Odyssey" to Shakespeare’s "Hamlet" to Joyce’s "Ulysses".
4. Map Wallace’s craft as found in the novel’s unique, genre-bending structure. Among the postmodern literary explorations awaiting us, the following:

• Intertextuality in a metafictional narrative
• A pastiche of maximalism, irony, and paranoia
• A world of fragmented hyperreality set in an age of digital ascension and corporate subsidization
• Perhaps the most extensive and important use of endnotes ever attempted in literary fiction

This encyclopedic riff on what we might ironically call our ‘popular culture and the entertainment based, consumer driven society’ serves up its treasures with Wallace’s unique humor intertwined with a mastery of the use of language, in defiance of Shakespeare’s adage that ‘brevity is the soul of wit.’

This course is the first of six in a series we call The Himalayas of Literature.