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Modern Myth And Ideology In David Foster Wallace's The Pale King, Matthew Ryan Stewart

MSU Graduate Theses

The purpose of this study is to analyze David Foster Wallace's novel The Pale King through the critical lenses of Lubomir Dolezel's Heterocosmica and Louis Althusser's "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" to arrive at a theory of the heroic in the novel. The Pale King features multiple characters experiencing various crises in the face of an invisible, adversarial force that can be understood through Dolezel's modern myth formulation, in which an invisible domain oppresses characters. This study analyzes three themes of the novel in which this interaction is most observable: the religious, the supernatural, and the civic themes. Althusser's work …