Introduction

Summary

In a chapter entitled “On Not Reading DFW” in her book Making Literature Now (2016), English Professor Amy Hungerford states that she refuses to read David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, the notorious thousand-page monster novel from 1999. Hungerford has her reasons. Among others, including misogyny and the undeserved hype created by the commercial publishing industry, she mentions the constraints on her reading time in defense of her choice of not allotting a month of her life to reading this doorstopper. She refers to Gabriel Zaid, author of So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance (2003), who “argues that excessively long books are a form of undemocratic dominance that impoverishes the public discourse by reducing the airtime shared among others” (Hungerford 2016).

In Wallace's case, she argues, writer, publisher, advertisers, and literary critics work together to produce and perpetuate a very specific notion of literary genius: a notion that hinges on size: “[t]he marketers knew their marks, projecting the aura of literary seriousness out toward reviewers … and daring them to man up, read a thousand pages, and prove they had something intelligent to say about it” (158). Hungerford argues that this type of authorial genius, where authors “make it big” by simply writing big books, is distinctly incongruent with our present day abundance of media. In her defense of not reading, she evokes the need for pragmatic resource allocation.

This makes sense. In our present-day information age, we are bombarded with unprecedented volumes of input from different channels. In today's attention economy (Fairchild 2007), the enormous amounts of texts available, vying for our eyes and brains with other forms of information and entertainment, make the modulation and allocation of attention a pressing matter. The attention economy is a notion that originated in marketing, describing the principle where we assign value to something according to its capacity to attract views, clicks, likes, and shares—these are currency in a world saturated with media. Information is not scarce by any means: cognitive effort, energy, time and, most importantly, attentional resources are. By this logic, no reader in her right mind should spend a month immersed in one novel.

It is therefore not surprising to see a considerable body of publications since the year 2000 that diagnose the literary novel as having a terminal illness, eulogize it, and lament it.