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“Cowboy, Paladin, Hero?”: Being Boys And Men In David Foster Wallace’S The Pale King, David J. Guidry
“Cowboy, Paladin, Hero?”: Being Boys And Men In David Foster Wallace’S The Pale King, David J. Guidry
University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations
Often aligned with post-postmodernism, David Foster Wallace’s later work retreats from the ironic detachment and cynicism of postmodernism in favor of a more sincere approach to writing. This is especially evident in his posthumous novel, The Pale King, a work dealing with what it means to be human in the Information Age. After locating the novel’s setting within a recent history of American masculinity and work, this paper examines several of the novel’s male characters as they struggle to be fully realized boys and men, concluding that The Pale King is Wallace’s final statement that enduring the ennui of …
Alive And Human: Situating Wallace, Lethem, And Russell In Contemporary Fiction, Carissa Kampmeier
Alive And Human: Situating Wallace, Lethem, And Russell In Contemporary Fiction, Carissa Kampmeier
Theses and Dissertations
This project will attempt to provide an outline of some of the most salient constructions of present-day literary fiction, where those constructions might overlap or conflict, and how various contemporary authors and their works might usefully fit within those constructions. This project will argue that fiction-writers following postmodernism are presented with a unique problem of how to write fiction in a way that acknowledges the problems of using language as a primary meaning-making structure without falling down a linguistic rabbit hole where a text ceases to be about anything other than itself. Beginning with David Foster Wallace, this project will …