Description
In recent years, the American fiction writer David Foster Wallace has been treated as a symbol, as an icon, and even a film character. Ordinary Unhappiness returns us to the reason we all know about him in the first place: his fiction. By closely examining Infinite Jest, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and The Pale King, Jon Baskin points readers to the work at the center of Wallace's oeuvre and places that writing in conversation with a philosophical tradition that includes Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard, and Cavell, among others. What emerges is a Wallace who not only speaks to our postmodern addictions in the age of mass entertainment and McDonald's but who seeks to address a quiet desperation at the heart of our modern lives. Freud said that the job of the therapeutic process was to turn hysterical misery into ordinary unhappiness. This book makes a case for how Wallace achieved this in his fiction.
Author: Jon Baskin
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 08/06/2019
Pages: 200
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.60lbs
Size: 8.40h x 5.50w x 0.40d
ISBN13: 9781503609303
ISBN10: 1503609308
BISAC Categories:
- Literary Criticism | American | General
- Philosophy | General
About the Author
Jon Baskin is the Associate Director of the Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism program at the New School for Social Research and a founding editor of The Point.