/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.3504172]

Can someone describe this book to me and exactly why this board seems to be so against it?

[Anonymous No.3504180]

It's a long book and a lot of people here like it and right now the people who haven't read it are retaliating.

[Anonymous No.3504179]

two narratives, one about a boy in a tennis academy, the other about a man in a rehab facility, as well as uncountable subplots.

[Anonymous No.3504191]

>>3504180
Most of the book's fans are exactly as your picture depicts: they cannot limn the merits of the book, they just say "I like it" in so many words.

"I like it" doesn't fly in literary analysis/critique.

[p No.3504194]

from the poor understanding of someone who just started reading this book and being part of this board, its a doorstopper that /lit/ seems to be divided on

Some think it's great, others think its good but gets too much recognition, others thinks its shit and DFW should be shot. Then they argue as to why it sucks/what's better etc etc

[Anonymous No.3506167]

“And Lo, for the Earth was empty of Form, and void. And Darkness was all over the Face of the Deep. And We said: 'Look at that fucker Dance.”

This quote pretty much sums up the writing style of the book.
And it only goes downhill from there.

[Anonymous No.3506215]

>>3504191
Can we not pretend to play critic and accept that reading's a hobby we do to enjoy?

[Anonymous No.3506242]

>>3504191
not the guy you're replying to, but i could talk at length about all the reasons why i liked the book. the problem is nobody has ever asked me, and if i posted it the likely reaction would be "tl;dr"

[Anonymous No.3506259]

Infinite Jest? More like Infinite Troll. Right guys?

[Anonymous No.3506291]

>>3506259
Spot on, hah. I got it. g-g-good one.

[Anonymous No.3506303]

I think it is a good book. I enjoyed it a lot and was never really bored by it. At times it is funny as hell.
I have to say though that some parts seem to be pretty random and don't seem to really fit in with the rest of the book or you find out how they fit in a few hundred pages later.

To sum it up, a good book that is interesting and fun to read, but can't hold up to other great works of literature.

[Anonymous No.3506330]

I think a lot of the DFW hate comes less from his written works and more from his interviews/personal character/literary reputation. At present, Wallace is becoming known for the "New Sincerity" movement, which often frames its aims with a quote from Wallace's essay on irony in TV, so I think a lot of the DFW backlash comes from readers skeptical of the possible "try-hard"ness of the movement. Though I'd say Wallace did try to create a level of sincerity in his works, this whole New Sincerity thing misrepresents him as the progenitor of the movement, a writer wholly obsessed with coming off as genuine, everyday, etc, even though the oft quoted passage from the essay doesn't even wholly accept the sort of total sincerity touted as the antidote to postmodernism (in fact, I think the quote might even appear in a footnote). And yes, I think Wallace was concerned with perceived sincerity to an absurd level (such as claiming his favorite novels were pulpy garbage when his fiction was clearly influenced by and meant to be highbrow), but I think if you try to define his work by this lens then a lot of it comes off as sappy, whiny, etc.

Continued...

[Anonymous No.3506337]

>>3506330

Basically, Infinite Jest is a good book and probably has a similar ratio of people liking/disliking it of almost any other "classic" book, the difference being that the ones who like it claim it to be a masterpiece, which it's not, thus infuriating those who do not like it. Almost anytime that Wallace's work is discussed, those who criticize it attack "DFW" rather than the works. DFW had a polarizing personality; the sort of 'smartest-kid-in-the-room-who-knows-he's-the-smatest' vibe that really irks some people while others are more find it inspiring or indicative of genius or whatever. Combine this with the aesthetics of IJ, a highly postmodern postmodernism that various critics either enjoy or see as decadent and want to tear down in favor of a new movement, and you have a book that stirs up the hatred of those who dislike it more than the average disliked book.

[Anonymous No.3506406]

>>3504191
That's so wrong. Like >>3506242 said, there are many reasons why we like Infinite Jest. Personally, I don't care to talk about it now, but here is a discussion I had with someone about it previously.

[Anonymous No.3506419]

>>3506337
I thought Infinite Jest was post-postmodernism

[Anonymous No.3506423]

>>3506419
It was neomodernism.

[Anonymous No.3506438]

Right now I'm reading A suppossedly fun thing i'll never do again.

>tfw you'll never read an essay on the Mahut - Isner match at Wimbledon written by David Foster Wallace

[Anonymous No.3506440]

>>3506423
can you explain?

[Anonymous No.3506468]

>>3506423
You're wrong—Infinite Jest is an excellent example of post-neomodernism.

[Anonymous No.3506480]

>>3506468
No sir, Infinite Jest is an example of Post-apocalyptic neo-fascism.

[Anonymous No.3506485]

>>3506337
>the sort of 'smartest-kid-in-the-room-who-knows-he's-the-smatest' vibe that really irks some people

When you frame the criticism in this context, there's no real way to argue without seeming bitter, which makes this a poorly constructed argument. I've never gotten that interpretation of DFW, nor do I think it's a common one. He doesn't come off as either particularly intelligent or arrogant.

[Anonymous No.3506488]

>>3506440
In a nutshell, it revives the modernist tradition of embracing the richness and color of language the same way as, say, Ulysses does..

[Anonymous No.3506490]

>>3506480
>IJ
>Post-apocalyptic
This is the second time I heard this. Care to explain?

[Anonymous No.3506491]

>>3506485
>He doesn't come off as either particularly intelligent or arrogant.
Yeah, what's that guy talking about?

Link to interview where he behaves as such yo

[Anonymous No.3506495]

All I'm gonna say about Wallace is that when it came out that he regularly read self-help books I can't say I was surprised at ALL. Dude writes with that sweeping vagueness and lack of nuance that helps self-help books appeal to so many people.

[Anonymous No.3506502]

>>3506485
I agree, he is anything but arrogant. Personally, I wouldn't consider him a genius either. Complex is a good way to describe him. You can really see the philosophy background in his interviews; the way he almost struggles to find the precise words to explain himself. I wish he wrote more about language.

[Anonymous No.3506518]

>>3506480
>>3506490
Yeah I've heard the same many times before. In what ways is IJ post-apocalyptic? I've never read the book and it doesn't seem to be PA from its description.

[Anonymous No.3506519]

>>3506502
>I wish he wrote more about language.

I don't remember anything he said about language being novel or anything. Read Philosophical Investigations or any philosophy of language and you'll come across the ideas.

[Anonymous No.3506530]

>>3506518
I dunno, I think people are just confusing dystopic with post-apocalyptic. There's one region in North America that's brutally polluted, but it's no more apocalypse threatening than a massive oil-spill.

[Anonymous No.3506538]

>>3506530
I wouldn't even describe the book as dystopic or anything. I just thought it was some kind of 'not too far away future' scenario (was the exact year ever mentioned?).

[Anonymous No.3506540]

>>3506495
>sweeping vagueness
>DFW

He was hardly vague. He went into great detail with just about everything he described - so much so that it turns a lot of people off of his writing. What are you talking about?

[Anonymous No.3506604]

>>3506538

its the best and most accurate cyber punk novel ever written

[Anonymous No.3506617]

>>3506495
>sweeping vagueness
The lack of vagueness is kind of the reason IJ is so bloody long in the first place

[Anonymous No.3506627]

>>3506617
That doesn't make very much sense.

[Anonymous No.3506628]

>>3506490
Wait, this was a serious description of IJ?!

[Anonymous No.3506631]

>>3506628
My sister's new boyfriend described it as such and I immediately lost all respect for the guy.

[Anonymous No.3506633]

>>3506480
>>3506490
>>3506518
you're describing the setting of the book, not the style of writing

[Anonymous No.3506638]

>>3506627
Like this guy said
>>3506540

He goes into so much detail with everything he writes about it's no surprise how thick the book is.

[Anonymous No.3506659]

>>3506627
>That doesn't make very much sense.
This is how I felt after reading IJ.

[Anonymous No.3506685]

>>3506659
you have to connect the dots yourself

if you weren't able to put this together you either didn't pay attention while you were reading, or you're stupid

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/ijend

[RomanianRichard No.3506690]

>>3506659
Well then can't the argument be made that you're simply too dense to understand what was being portrayed to you? If one understands a piece of literature as it was meant to be understood and the other does not, who is it that is not taking the time to ingest what is being presented to them?
IJ is without a doubt a dense book, but the only time I didn't comprehend what was being written was when I let my mind stray away from what I was reading. At which point I'd scold myself and read the page or passage again.

IJ is horrible as a casual read, but if you're there and actively participating in what the book is trying to offer, it's one of the more enjoyable and satisfying reads out there.

It's not a difficult read by any means, it's simply one that demands your attention.

[Anonymous No.3506707]

>>3506690
>it's simply one that demands your attention
It didn't shout loud enough. DFW is a hack.

[Anonymous No.3506708]

Can someone link me to DFW's suicide note? Google does nothing.

[Anonymous No.3506715]

>>3506538
I didn't read the book but I heard that the title refers to a movie in the book that is infinitely long and entertaining, consuming its viewers so that they lose all interest in life, and the federal government is scrambling to control it. Sounds pretty dystopian to me.

[Anonymous No.3506718]

>>3506690
>IJ is horrible as a casual read
Oh man this is definitely the case

This isn't to be read on the bus home or anything like that. You need to set aside some quiet time somewhere comfortable where you can concentrate otherwise you'll miss a load of stuff.

[Anonymous No.3506725]

>>3506715
The film isn't infinite itself but it does leave the viewer with no other mental compulsion other than continued viewing.

It's not so much a dystopia but an exaggeration of modern society. Life is still fairly similar to how it is now except certain aspects have become a bit more absurd.

[Anonymous No.3506727]

>>3506502
One of my favorite essays by him is "Authority and American Usage," which doesn't delve so much in a philosophical investigation of language (but there is a small part where he shares his personal connection to Wittgenstein) more than examining rhetorical conventions.

[Anonymous No.3506732]

>>3506530
>not realizing we are living in a PA world currently
it's just that we didn't suffer the apocalypse, nature did
WRAP YOUR HEAD AROUND THAT

[Anonymous No.3506738]

>>3506725
>It's not so much a dystopia but an exaggeration of modern society.
Isn't how most dystopia finds poignancy? I might be working with a narrow definition but anything that introduces a fantastic element that portrays society negatively qualifies as dystopian for me.

[Anonymous No.3506755]

Against it? That's news to me.

I'm fairly certain getting people to read it is one of /lit/'s longest running jokes... I made it about 100 pages in before I caught on.

[Anonymous No.3507060]

>>3506755
I know that this is a bait but the first 200 pages are really somewhat hard to get through.

[Anonymous No.3507500]

>>3506708
>>3506708
I'm interested in this also.

[Anonymous No.3507582]

>>3506485
>>3506491
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_sQrxAorDo

[Anonymous No.3507586]

>>3506480
>post apocalyptic
If anything, it's dystopian

[Anonymous No.3507598]

Posting Wallace's syllabus just because.

[Anonymous No.3507600]

[Anonymous No.3507604]

>>3506540
>He went into great detail with just about everything he described

He used the artifice of extraneous detail, but he never actually said anything meaningful. That's the only possible point you could get from his work because when it came down to any kind of "meaning" or whatever, there's nothing there but vagueness. He was vague on the stuff that matters, hyper-detailed on the stuff that doesn't and I'm willing to bet that was 100% his purpose.

[Anonymous No.3507606]

[Anonymous No.3507610]

[Anonymous No.3507613]

brb dinner

[Anonymous No.3507658]

[Anonymous No.3507661]

k

[p No.3507706]

>>3507661

I'm taking a class with a guy who was a student/protege/friend of his so-to-speak, weird seeing this shit up here.

The professor asked us what we read for fun and one kid was all "Infinite jest over and over" and my prof was all "Fuck are you serious?" before just moving on to the next person hahahaha.

[Anonymous No.3507713]

>>3507658
>>3507613
>>3507610
Damn, I wish my school was on the semester system. I'm at UC Irvine where we do quarters (10 weeks) and would not be able to get through half of the texts on this syllabus, looks challenging but enjoyable. Wish we had more time

[Anonymous No.3507724]

Do you think he preferred to be called David? or Professor Wallace?

Or maybe the informal D-Dawg?

[Anonymous No.3507734]

>>3507724
He did not consider himself a professor so probably David or D-Dawg.

[sage No.3507739]

sage this isn't literature you're just some faggot posting history.

>>>/pol/
>>>/int/
>>>/y/

Stupid christfag shit lol you don't know that god isn't real I know because of Zietgiest and Dawkins. Faggot inot intry level shit not sophisticated loke Muh joyce and dostoryeveskolkhuyckeywesnislknelkapidorsky. Is this in fucking dutch? what the fuck other languages arnt literature this is theology sage asat afaerfenkdflnssgrs nigger jew ass cocks attention whore faggoty faggot reader faggot do you even read jews did nine eleven. Stephen Kind fucking sucks Don't post your fucking library here you huge cumfartwhorebag. I can't believe I'm posting in a George RR Martin thread.

[Anonymous No.3507769]

>>3507713
Those UC feels.

Davis here. Turns out there's a lot of UCD students on /a/; I'm not sure about /lit/ though. A kid in my class who never goes to lectures or turns in his papers on time thinks /lit/ has the worst taste.

[Anonymous No.3507773]

>>3507739
not sure if bad troll or just posting in wrong thread

[Anonymous No.3507782]

>>3507606
>DFW will never say one of your papers was "Mind-blowingly good"

[Anonymous No.3507795]

>>3507782
>DFW suggests you drop his class because you're an average student who writes well enough but usually always falls back on "the ideas being good" to get you a B

[Anonymous No.3507900]

>>3507604
not the guy you're replying to, but you either made a very, very poor reading of the book, didn't pay attention, or have a very different idea of what constitutes "meaning"

just pulling a few examples off the top of my head:

subsidized time > corporate power over categorical knowledge
gentle administration > collapsing/coalition of green and libertarian ideologies, which is already happening
"MIT language riots" > the implicated logical extreme of chomsky's linguistic and political projects

and this is not touching the book's main theme (entertainment), the many times he engages his clear essayist voice on depression, anhedonia, suicide, addiction, or sobriety. i haven't even gone into the content of the discussions between marathe and steeply, orin's character, domestic violence (via pemulis and gately's mother), annular fusion and the great concavity, the idea of ONAN, it's really a big book with quite a bit to say. you're just being contrarian.

i dont claim that IJ is among the "classics", in my view DFW doesn't rank with faulkner or morrison, but IJ is at least a cut or two above what normally passes for contemporary literature (palahniuk, GRRM, hunger games, etc)

[Anonymous No.3507902]

>>3507900
> but IJ is at least a cut or two above what normally passes for contemporary literature (palahniuk, GRRM, hunger games, etc)

i just wanted to point out how well you summed up what /lit/ is all about here

/lit/ - but IJ is at least a cut or two above what normally passes for contemporary literature (palahniuk, GRRM, hunger games, etc)

[Anonymous No.3507952]

>>3507900
hi good post, when you mention orin are you talking about the oedipal psychological deal? or something less obvious? i only read IJ once, i'm wondering more about his character right now

[Anonymous No.3507961]

>>3507952
theres a lot to him, but i was thinking of his massive narcissism. he dazzles himself to such a degree that he doesn't see through steeply's obvious disguise when "she" interviews orin for a soft profile and just hits on "her" through the whole interview.

how he makes or tries to make every woman fall in love with him and then abandons them, how he doesn't really listen to anyone else in the family, his traumatic relationship with joelle, etc.

[Anonymous No.3507964]

>>3507961
I'm sure we've all hard DFW was supposedly a massive man whore? Not sure of the validity of that claim, but after that, I started seeing Orin as this repository for some of DFW's personality flaws that he might have seen in himself. With a guy that stresses the importance of "feeling" in literature, I thought it could be possible, IDK.

[Anonymous No.3507975]

>>3507964
i think all the characters are reflections/refractions of DFW. some people take issue with this but i was basically okay with it, and pretty much anticipated this might be the case from the outset.

i havent read his biography, but im guessing he got sex from his fans on a different sort of basis than orin. orin's character makes seduction into a craft, a sport. he wants to make himself into an ideal partner for everyone he meets, because he wants to be known and remembered as the perfect man.

this is not how i imagine dfw went about himself and sex.

[Anonymous No.3507980]

>>3507975
Yeah, I guess so. I was just going off the line that supposedly he "smelt the fresh cunt in the air."

[Anonymous No.3508044]

>>3507961
the narcissism, good point, i'm remembering the interview scene now, sweet.

>how he makes or tries to make every woman fall in love with him and then abandons them,
extension of oedipal type
(i dont know anything about psychology or pop-psyhcology really, but there's my input)

>>3507975
>i think all the characters are reflections/refractions of DFW
i got this sense to an extent, but it seems more common than uncommon in fiction i've read, i can only think of a couple authors who don't seem to me to be 'writing about themselves' essentially. probably an interesting discussion to be had about this topic or like 'self-fascination'/solipsism in general lit. where is the line between 'mary sue'-ing & acceptability, what's the standard? even shakespeare was writing hamlet as shakespeare, right? i am rambling

[Anonymous No.3509123]

>>3507964
Orin - id; Hal - ego; Mario - superego?

and/or

Orin - Dmitri; Hal - Ivan; Mario - Alyosha?

[Anonymous No.3509150]

'IJ' is basically a rehash of PKD's 'A Scanner Darkly', recast with the type of flair wherein the author goes to great lengths to confuse the reader via frequent shifts in setting & narration style, a style DFW plagiarized from 'The Sound and the Fury' and 'Ada or Ardor'.

[Anonymous No.3509166]

>>3509150
lol, what a shit criticism.

[Anonymous No.3509208]

>>3509166
Not a criticism so much as a statement of fact. And to his credit, DFW could have picked worse than PKD, Nabokov, and Faulkner to rip off. But if you don't see why the book is a rehash of 'A Scanner Darkly' (the novel, not the screen adaptation), then you must be pretty dumb.

[Anonymous No.3509517]

>>3509208
>>3509150
the "shifts" in 'the sound and fury' didn't seem like they were intended to "confuse the reader" & neither do they in 'infinite jest'...they don't even seem that similar, "rip off" is probably a leap. the only example of this style of nonlinear storytelling that seemed to me to be intentionally confusing is pynchon's 'V.' but even that one might just be me. i think attributing this broad narrative style/device to a desire to "confuse the reader" is awfully shallow & cynical in a pretty absurd way

[Anonymous No.3509521]

>>3509208
He actually ripped off Don DeLillo more than he did those other guys

[Anonymous No.3509524]

>>3509521
i thought IJ was pretty similar to 'Underworld,' but which delillo are you talking about?

[Anonymous No.3509546]

>>3509524
Just read any description of White Noise and you'll notice a bunch of similarities...

[Anonymous No.3509551]

>>3509521
If he "ripped off" anything in IJ, it was TBK and GR. But being influenced by an idea is not the same thing as plagiarism, otherwise we might as well dismiss Virgil and Shakespeare plagiarists too.

[Anonymous No.3509553]

>>3507900
I never actually read the book and was just making shit up.

[Anonymous No.3509571]

>>3509553
You and every other DFW hater on this board.