/lit/ - Literature

Dumping his course syllabus

1

David Foster Wallace's course is much better

"Don't let any potential lightweightish-looking qualities of the texts delude you into thinking that this will be a blowoff-type class"

>>2040271
Pic even more related.
Read the "Warning" paragraph at the bottom of the page.

Just gonna throw these up since it's relevant to the talk.
1/6

Infinite Jest is good. Brief Interviews With Hideous Men is a better introductory place to get into Wallace's writing. There are high marks hit in Infinite Jest he didn't get to again in his career but it's a deeply flawed novel. The ending will make you rage.

A lot of the purported difficulty in the book comes from some superfluous mathematics he flavours one of the scenes with: It is not necessary to "follow" this part to get the main jist of the novel. Actually most of that math is for the sake of a title gag. Other issues people have tend to include the vocabulary (get used to reading annular, kertwang, and whinge), and there are long passages of the novel written in Quebecois-tinted English which tends to get annoying.

>>1192655
But hell, this is a pretty interesting facet of Wallace's career. I suppose it deserves some expanding on. Excerpt (the funny one) from Authority and American Usage:

>
I don't know whether anybody's told you this or not, but when you're in a college English class you're basically studying a foreign dialect. This dialect is called 'Standard Written English. ... From talking with you and reading your essays, I've concluded that your own primary dialect is [one of three variants of SBE common to our region]. Now, let me spell something out in my official Teacher-voice: The SBE you're fluent in is different from SWE in all kindsof important ways. Some of these differences are grammatical — for example, double negatives are OK in Standard Black English but not in SWE, and SBEand SWE conjugate certain verbs in totally different ways. Other differences have more to do with style — for instance, Standard Written English tends to use a lot more subordinate clauses in the early parts of sentences, and it sets off most of these early subordinates with commas,and, under SWE rules, writing that doesn't do this is "choppy." There are tons of differences like that. How much of this stuff do you already know?

I'm surprised at the books he had in his required reading list.