Global quotations: David Foster Wallace and world literature

Abstract

The central argument of this thesis is that Wallace’s current cultural and scholarly position, as a parochial and emphatically American figure, needs to be reconsidered. This is because his work, although frequently preoccupied with particularly American concerns, uses world literature in important ways. Time and again, Wallace’s fiction draws on a diverse range of global texts, appropriating various forms of world literature in the attempt to craft fiction that critiques US culture from a slightly oblique, unexpected vantage point. Although I take issue with the US-centric interpretation generated by many scholarly readers of Wallace’s work, my argument is not intended as a corrective to this strain of criticism but as a complementary, adjacent approach. This is because Wallace’s engagements with world literature so frequently feed back into his idiosyncratic critiques of American culture. Individual chapters of my thesis reassess Wallace’s body of work in relation to five broadly construed geographical territories: Latin America, Russia, Eastern Europe, France, and Africa. By expanding the geographical coordinates of Wallace’s work in this way, we begin to see the ways in which he played particular literary traditions off one another, appropriating radically varied global texts within his own fiction. Simultaneously, my argument also develops five complementary theories concerning the ways in which artistic influence functions in Wallace’s fiction, showing how Wallace’s engagements with world literature are mediated via specific strategies of artistic appropriation.