Ransom Center Magazine

David Foster Wallace

Fellows Find: Revelations hidden on post-its, in book flaps, and in the margins of the papers in David Foster Wallace’s archive

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Stephen J. Burn, a Reader in American Literature after 1945 at the University of Glasgow, visited the Ransom Center during the spring of 2011 to research his book-in-progress, Neurofiction: the Contemporary American Novel and the Brain (Don DeLillo/ David Foster Wallace). Burn’s research was supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Research Fellowship Endowment.

 

When I first visited the Harry Ransom Center in August of 2008, I wasn’t looking for David Foster Wallace. I’d just finished revising a book that read Wallace alongside his contemporaries Jonathan Franzen and Richard Powers (Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism), and was putting together a blueprint for a new book that I planned to build out of the Center’s archive of Don DeLillo’s assorted drafts and research materials. [Read more…] about Fellows Find: Revelations hidden on post-its, in book flaps, and in the margins of the papers in David Foster Wallace’s archive

David Foster Wallace and 20 years of Infinite Jest

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Twenty years ago, in February of 1996, Little, Brown and Company published David Foster Wallace’s (1962–2008) novel Infinite Jest. It was a bold undertaking for the firm to publish a complex, challenging novel that spans over 1,000 pages and contains hundreds of endnotes, many quite lengthy and all printed in very small type. The sheer size of the book required that it be sold for $30, an unorthodox price for any novel, let alone a second novel by a young, up-and-coming author. [Read more…] about David Foster Wallace and 20 years of Infinite Jest

Accessing David Foster Wallace’s “other selves” through the archive

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To commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the publication of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, Heather Houser, an Associate Professor of English at The University of Texas at Austin, will be one of the readers sharing their favorite passages from the novel on Wednesday, February 3, at noon. Undergraduates Dylan Davidson, Kendall DeBoer, Michael Esparza, and Deborah Lin will also be reading at the free event, Prose on the Plaza.

Past seminars Houser has taught on David Foster Wallace’s work have included class visits to the Ransom Center to view materials from the archive.

[Read more…] about Accessing David Foster Wallace’s “other selves” through the archive

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