Book contents
- David Foster Wallace in Context
- David Foster Wallace in Context
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I Contexts
- Chapter 1 David Foster Wallace and Narratology
- Chapter 2 A Meeting of Minds
- Chapter 3 Writing in a Material World
- Chapter 4 Confidence Man
- Chapter 5 David Foster Wallace and European Literature
- Chapter 6 David Foster Wallace and Poetry
- Chapter 7 David Foster Wallace’s “Non”-Fiction
- Chapter 8 “Thanks Everybody and I Hope You Like It”
- Chapter 9 David Foster Wallace and Visual Culture
- Part II Ideas
- Part III Bodies
- Part IV Systems
- Works by David Foster Wallace
- Bibliography of Secondary Sources
- Index
Chapter 2 - A Meeting of Minds
David Foster Wallace, Vladimir Nabokov and the Ethics of Empathy
from Part I - Contexts
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
- Chapter 1 David Foster Wallace and Narratology
- Chapter 2 A Meeting of Minds
- Chapter 3 Writing in a Material World
- Chapter 4 Confidence Man
- Chapter 5 David Foster Wallace and European Literature
- Chapter 6 David Foster Wallace and Poetry
- Chapter 7 David Foster Wallace’s “Non”-Fiction
- Chapter 8 “Thanks Everybody and I Hope You Like It”
- Chapter 9 David Foster Wallace and Visual Culture
- Part II Ideas
- Part III Bodies
- Part IV Systems
- Works by David Foster Wallace
- Bibliography of Secondary Sources
- Index
Summary
Wallace was a writer deeply aware of his debts to other authors. One such was Vladimir Nabokov, whom Wallace referred to as one of “the real geniuses, the writers who weathered real shock and invented this stuff in contemporary fiction.” Brian Boyd’s pioneering work on Nabokov argues that our need to close-read Nabokov’s novelistic puzzle pieces serves as an allegory for how Nabokov felt we should pay attention to the natural world and all its rich patterning. This chapter uses Boyd’s work on Nabokov as a lens to examine how Wallace engages in a similar practice, using reading as a metonymic practice, a dry run of sorts for encountering the world. The chapter identifies key differences between Wallace and Nabokov, specifically Wallace’s ethical commitment to empathy and otherness, but traces the rich and untapped overlaps between the two authors, examining solipsism, self-reflexivity, allusions and an abiding fascination with both the workings of human consciousness and the relationship between author and reader, among other thematic and formal commonalities. Developing a poetics of attention that is taken up elsewhere in the volume, this chapter works to elucidate how Wallace, after and against Nabokov, used practical literary strategies and tools to persuade and teach his readers to practice empathy in and toward the world.
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- David Foster Wallace in Context , pp. 26 - 35Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022