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  • Chapter 7 - David Foster Wallace’s “Non”-Fiction

  • from Part I - Contexts
  • Edited by Clare Hayes-Brady, University College Dublin
  • Book:
    David Foster Wallace in Context
    Published online:
    18 November 2022
    Print publication:
    01 December 2022, pp 76-85

  • Summary

    Though primarily known and studied as a writer of fiction, Wallace was an avid reader and writer of nonfiction. This chapter explores the ways in which his nonfiction attempts to direct and sometimes complicates a reading of his fiction, as well as appraising the nonfiction in its own cultural context. The essay offers a taxonomy of Wallace’s nonfictional forms, connecting the work with his broader representational project for life in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The chapter works to interrogate Wallace’s creation of an authorial persona that created, sought to control and often undermined the extratextual persona of its author. Framing the essays as both complementing and challenging the fiction, this chapter assesses the “impervious sun” of the nonfiction as an important voice of the contemporary period in its own right.