Conjuring David Foster Wallace’s Ghost: Prosopopeia, Whitmanian Intimacy and the Queer Potential of Infinite Jest and The Pale King

Vincent Haddad

doi:10.16995/orbit.139

Conjuring David Foster Wallace’s Ghost: Prosopopeia, Whitmanian Intimacy and the Queer Potential of Infinite Jest and The Pale King

Orbit A Journal of American Literature ◽

10.16995/orbit.139 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 5 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Vincent Haddad

Keyword(s):

Infinite Jest

Download Full-text

'Always think of the objects': Ekphrasis as aesthetics in the contemporary novel

10.26686/wgtn.17007946 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

◽

Lucy Eleanor Alston

Keyword(s):

Critical Theory ◽

Case Studies ◽

Final Section ◽

Critical Discourse ◽

The Novel ◽

Infinite Jest ◽

Contemporary Novel ◽

Critical Attention ◽

The Aesthetic ◽

Temporal Qualities

It is a commonplace that ekphrasis – the description in literature of a visual work of art – brings to the fore questions of representation and reference. Such questions are particularly associated with the ‘postmodern’; ekphrasis is thus often subsumed under the category of metafiction. There has been little critical attention, however, to how the ekphrastic mode might be understood in aesthetic terms. This thesis considers the nature of ekphrasis’s referential capacity, but expands on this to suggest a number of ways in which the ekphrastic mode evinces the aesthetic and ontological assumptions upon which a text is predicated. Two case studies illustrate how the ekphrastic mode can be figured to different effect. In comparing these two novels, this thesis argues that the ekphrastic mode makes clear the particular subject-object relations expressed by each. If Lukács is correct in asserting that the novel mode expresses a discrepancy between ‘the conventionality of the objective world and the interiority of the subjective one’, ekphrasis provides a fruitful but under-explored avenue for critical inquiry because, as a mode, it is situated at the point at which subject and object must converge. The first chapter of this thesis is concerned with Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station (2011), a novel that includes both traditional ekphrastic descriptions and embedded photographs and references to critical theory that function ekphrastically. David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996) provides a contrast: the novel makes continued reference to film – a medium defined by its temporal qualities – but as used in the novel the ekphrastic mode implies a fixed, ahistorical schema. The implications that such differences have on the novel mode and critical discourse are explored in the final section of the thesis.

Download Full-text