Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-tj2md Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-20T03:44:34.677Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 17 - David Foster Wallace and Existentialism

from Part II - Ideas

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 November 2022

Clare Hayes-Brady
Affiliation:
University College Dublin
Get access

Summary

The work of David Foster Wallace can be seen to critically renew ideas and concerns from existentialist philosophy and literature. Wallace repeatedly expressed his admiration of existentialist authors, and his fiction contains many explicit and implicit references to their writings. This chapter will provide an overview of the main themes and intertextual connections that Wallace’s work shares with the existentialists, such as a comparison with Sartre’s view of consciousness, Kierkegaard’s critique of irony, and Camus’s relation of meaningful existence to community; also, a brief comparative reading of the opening of Infinite Jest and Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” of “The Depressed Person” and Beauvoir’s “The Monologue,” and of “B.I. #20” and Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground. Overall, Wallace shares with these authors the conviction that philosophy and literature are partially overlapping activities, that some philosophical problems are best approached through literature, and that their works therefore blur the boundaries between these modes of writing.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×