IJ study archive

ENGLISH 4615/5615: Text in Context — Infinite Jest (course syllabus)

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TL;DR

A full-semester university syllabus — Gerry Canavan's Fall 2016 Marquette seminar built entirely around Infinite Jest in the novel's twentieth-anniversary year. It is a teaching-and-reception artifact rather than a work of criticism: its interest is in what a scholar chooses to teach alongside the novel and how he frames it for students. The course runs in three movements — a prelude that literally begins at the end (This Is Water, Hamlet's Yorick speech, the 2008 memorial-service remarks), a roughly nine-week slow read of the novel itself (between fourteen and eighty-six pages per class), and a coda of afterlives: later Wallace and the criticism. Canavan calls Infinite Jest a book that "may well be the greatest work of American literature that has been produced in the last thirty years", and stakes an explicit interpretive position in his content note: that the tradition equating genius with suffering is "fundamentally flawed—as I believe Wallace himself did", and that the gravitational pull of Wallace's suicide should be reckoned with but resisted rather than allowed to become the novel's only meaning.

Key claims

  • Three-part architecture, deliberately beginning at the end. The schedule's opening unit ("PRELUDE: BEGINNING AT THE END", as the syllabus prints it) puts Wallace's death and memorials before the novel is read; the closing unit ("CODA: AFTERLIVES") covers the afterlife and the criticism. The middle is a page-metered slow read (the schedule gives an "Infinite Jest pages per day" count per class, peaking at 86 pages for the 24 Oct meeting).
  • A reading-pace apparatus. The schedule assigns the novel in fixed page targets (through p. 17, p. 63, p. 127 … up to p. 981 by 14 November), a concrete map of how one experienced teacher paces the book across a term.
  • The "Convergence" assignment. In lieu of a week-nine reading journal, students map "the parallel lines you see as converging and the end that you project" — the exercise quotes Wallace's own statement that "Certain kind of parallel lines are supposed to start converging in such a way that an ‘end’ can be projected by the reader somewhere beyond the right frame."
  • An explicit stance on biographical criticism. The content note warns that "our unhappy knowledge of Wallace’s own eventual suicide now exerts a sort of extra-tragic gravitational pull upon the novel," and that Canavan will "truly reject" the genius-through-suffering tradition "as being fundamentally flawed—as I believe Wallace himself did".
  • The entrance survey borrows Wallace's own syllabus questions. Its "Student Info Sheet" questions are, per the syllabus, "adopted from David Foster Wallace’s own syllabi (reprinted in The David Foster Wallace Reader [2016])."
  • A curated critical apparatus. Beyond the novel, the course assigns memorial remarks and a slate of critical essays (Cohen, Hayles, Konstantinou, Kelly, Finn, Fitzpatrick), and lists a further-reading shelf of companion volumes and Wallace-studies collections — the shape of the IJ teaching canon as one scholar drew it in 2016.

Theories & evidence

THEORY: Infinite Jest does have an ending — a convergence the reader is meant to project beyond the novel's right-hand frame

  • Crux: ending-missing-year
  • Stance: endorses
  • Evidence:
    • [author] The syllabus quotes Wallace directly: "There is an ending as far as I'm concerned. Certain kind of parallel lines are supposed to start converging in such a way that an ‘end’ can be projected by the reader somewhere beyond the right frame. If no such convergence or projection occurred to you, then the book's failed for you." [Assignment Checklist, "Convergence"]
    • [inference] Canavan builds a graded assignment on the premise, asking students to bring "your personal map of this “convergence,”" to class — treating the projectable end as a real reading task, not a defect. [Assignment Checklist]
  • Notes: The theory is Wallace's, carried and endorsed by the syllabus as the organizing frame for the whole course (its prelude literally begins at the end). Recorded as [author] because the quoted statement is Wallace's own; the syllabus's contribution is pedagogical endorsement, not new argument. Counterweight the source itself supplies: Wallace's clause "then the book's failed for you" leaves open that the convergence may not occur for a given reader — the projection is offered as contingent, not guaranteed.

Themes

Reception and canon formation (which secondary works enter a scholar's IJ syllabus in 2016); pedagogy and the practical problem of pacing a thousand-page novel; biographical criticism and its limits (the suicide's "gravitational pull"); the genius-and-suffering myth Wallace and Canavan both reject; the novel's ending and the reader's projected convergence.

Cross-references

Notable passages

Verbatim from the syllabus (Canavan's prose unless marked; the raw's curly punctuation reproduced as-is).

  • The header epigraph, from Wallace: good fiction's job was "to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable".
  • "Infinite Jest may well be the greatest work of American literature that has been produced in the last thirty years (if not much longer)."
  • "our unhappy knowledge of Wallace’s own eventual suicide now exerts a sort of extra-tragic gravitational pull upon the novel"
  • "I want to say at the outset of this course, very explicitly, that I truly reject this tradition of thought as being fundamentally flawed—as I believe Wallace himself did—and I urge you to do the same."
  • On the length: "Look, there’s just no getting around it: it’s a long book."
  • Wallace, quoted in the "Convergence" assignment: "There is an ending as far as I'm concerned. Certain kind of parallel lines are supposed to start converging in such a way that an ‘end’ can be projected by the reader somewhere beyond the right frame."

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