The Legacy of David Foster Wallace

U of Iowa Press, "The New American Canon" series, 2012. The memorial and legacy anthology assembled after Wallace’s 2008 death: fiction-writer tributes (DeLillo, Saunders, Moody, Franzen) and memorial-service remarks interleaved with critical essays, in three parts — I History, II Aesthetics, III Community — closing on an interview with his editor and two essays on his footnotes and his archive. Only a subset bears directly on Infinite Jest; those get deep treatment below, the rest one-liners.

Page cites are the book’s PRINTED pages (read from the running-footer folios). In the archived PDF the printed folio runs about twenty pages behind the file page (printed page ≈ PDF page − 20, drifting to −21 earlier in the volume), so cite the printed number, not a fixed offset. The archived file is the e-book: its copyright page states the Dave Eggers foreword is not included, so that chapter is absent here. Wallace’s own novel is quoted by the contributors from the Little, Brown first edition.

TL;DR

The first collective stock-taking of Wallace’s achievement, published four years after his suicide: half elegy (writers who knew him), half criticism. For Infinite Jest its strongest cards are four essays. Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s "Infinite Summer" is the fullest scholarly account of the 2009 online mass read of the novel, arguing that networked reading realized the empathic connection Wallace hoped fiction could make — connection not just between reader and text but among readers. Lee Konstantinou’s "No Bull" reads the whole novel, and the Entertainment inside it, as an engine of postironic belief: metafiction’s techniques turned from irony toward faith, with James Incandenza’s film understood first as an avant-garde act of communication and only then as a weapon. Samuel Cohen’s "To Wish to Try to Sing to the Next Generation" reads Infinite Jest as a Künstlerroman shadowing Wallace’s own crisis of influence circa 1989, and disputes Stephen Burn’s self-erasure account of the ending. Heather Houser’s "Infinite Jest’s Environmental Case for Disgust" makes the novel’s O.N.A.N. ecology and its disgust central rather than marginal. The volume also carries the primary Pietsch interview on editing the novel and Ira Nadel’s essay on its endnotes — the best firsthand account here of how the book was cut and how its apparatus was fixed.

Key claims

Kathleen Fitzpatrick, "Infinite Summer: Reading, Empathy, and the Social Network" (pp. 182–207)

• The thesis: Infinite Jest proved Wallace’s faith in fiction as connection, and its 2009 online mass read extended that connection among readers. Where Pynchon and DeLillo saw television as a threat that produced passive masses, Wallace treats television as a symptom of a distinctively American loneliness the tube then worsens; the danger he feared for fiction was not lost attention span but the ironic detachment that severs the novelist from others’ pain (pp. 182–83).
• Infinite Summer’s mechanics. "Seattle blogger Matthew Baldwin launched Infinite Summer on" 1 June 2009 to force himself through a book he had owned for years and never finished; the schedule was seventy-five pages a week between 21 June and 22 September, with four first-time guides posting weekly. It described itself as an "online group reading project that, I argue, instantiates this potential in" the act of reading, and it spread fast — posts on Ezra Klein’s Washington Post blog, Entertainment Weekly’s PopWatch, the Guardian Books Blog; a ~2,000-member Facebook group; the #infsum Twitter hashtag; LiveJournal, Shelfari and Goodreads presences (pp. 192–93).
• The empathy argument, via LaCapra and Landsberg. Fitzpatrick distinguishes sympathy (projecting one’s own feelings onto another, the mode she assigns to Oprah’s Book Club) from empathy (feeling for another while acknowledging their irreducible otherness). Wallace’s fiction courts the second; so, she argues, does reading it together in public (pp. 185–90).
• Why the network changes the picture — and where the novel was wrong. Infinite Jest imagined the future of media as an extension of television: the teleputer is a one-to-many receiver that only requests more. The actual Internet is a many-to-many read/write network, and that difference is what let dispersed readers form a community the novel’s own model could not foresee (pp. 197–98). She reads the AA sections — "try to Identify instead of Compare," with Identify glossed as empathize (IJ p. 345) — as the place where Wallace theorizes exactly this painful opening to another (the AA material of scene 178’s stretch) (pp. 198–99).
• A cautionary case: infinitedetox. A pseudonymous participant posted "My name is infinitedetox and I am an addict", describing how a first reading of the novel made him quit opiates. Fitzpatrick reads this as a naïve over-identification — mistaking a book about addiction for the struggle itself — corrected only when Infinite Summer gave him a venue for shared, ongoing engagement (pp. 194–95). A footnote records George Carr’s reminder that the novel’s final injunction is to put the book down and go live your life (p. 204 n.10). There are "encouraging signs" that "Internet do not seem to be driving reading into obsolescence." (pp. 202–03).

Lee Konstantinou, "No Bull: David Foster Wallace and Postironic Belief" (pp. 83–112)

• The frame: the End of History. Wallace’s career is situated against Fukuyama’s 1989 "end of history" and its listless, antidepressant-medicated aftermath — market triumphalism plus theoretical antifoundationalism (Rorty). Against it Wallace wanted "an ethos of postironic belief." (pp. 83–85).
• The believer as ethical countertype. Wallace’s anti-rebel is given no positive doctrinal content; what he wants are new forms of belief — a religious vocabulary (God, prayer) emptied of specific content. Konstantinou’s exhibit is recovering addict Don Gately, who has no personal conception of God yet hits his knees morning and night and gets through the day clean (IJ pp. 443, 350): the reader’s relation to belief is meant to resemble Gately’s relation to God (pp. 85–86). For Wallace, "creating postironic belief was the goal of literary communication", and the ethical countertype he wants he calls the believer (p. 85).
• Postirony, not meta-irony. Konstantinou explicitly disputes A. O. Scott’s meta-irony and Marshall Boswell’s and Iannis Goerlandt’s meta-ironic readings, which cast Wallace as another turn of irony’s self-negating dialectic. Postirony is instead a more modest project: to decouple metafictional form from ironic knowingness, so that if a cynic can be naïve, someone nonnaïve can be a noncynic — postirony "is the better term for Wallace’s project" (pp. 89–91). Octet and Good Old Neon are read as small-scale versions that puncture the fourth wall toward the author (belief) rather than toward the reader (disbelief) (pp. 93–98).
• The Entertainment as avant-garde communication. The core Infinite Jest reading: the film is an avant-garde artwork in Peter Bürger’s sense — an attack on art as an institution — but where the historical avant-garde attacked the supply side, "Infinite Jest" attacks the consumer, ending the viewer’s ability to consume anything again (pp. 98–99). Its very existence rebuts Bürger’s claim that such art is impossible. And its original purpose was not destruction but connection: Konstantinou quotes the wraith’s account, that James built the cartridge "contrive a medium via which he [James] and the muted son [Hal] could" simply converse, to reverse thrust on "a young self’s fall into the womb of solipsism" (IJ pp. 838–39; scene 162). The crib’s-eye infantilizing lens from Joelle’s interview — "I don’t think there’s much doubt the lens" was meant to "reproduce an infantile visual field" (IJ pp. 939–40; scene 178) — shows the film simultaneously critiquing avant-garde self-involution and mass-media infantilization (p. 102).
• Infinite Jest as Barthelmean "Hostile Object." Following Donald Barthelme’s book-as-thing-in-the-world, Konstantinou reads the novel’s girth, tangled syntax and hundred-page endnote apparatus as the avant-garde aggressiveness toward readers that the Entertainment literalizes; the A.F.R. seek to use the Entertainment "as a terrorist weapon against American consumers." and Wallace encodes the artist-as-terrorist (DeLillo’s Mao II) into both plot and form (pp. 100–101).
• The limit Konstantinou himself names. Unlike the historical avant-garde, Wallace has little to say about changing the institutions that produce the ironist; his toolkit stays liberal and individualist, so he may have been doomed to fail in strictly literal terms. A closing footnote concedes that The Pale King addresses the structural causes of postmodern suffering more than Infinite Jest does (pp. 105–06, 109 n.13).

Samuel Cohen, "To Wish to Try to Sing to the Next Generation: Infinite Jest’s History" (pp. 59–79)

• The novel read through Wallace’s 1989 crisis. Cohen argues you cannot fully understand Infinite Jest without what Wallace felt about writing when he wrote it: the failed reception of Girl with Curious Hair, the abandoned A Failed Entertainment manuscript, the aborted return to philosophy at Harvard, the breakdown and halfway-house stay, the letters to Franzen calling himself a failed writer at 28 without a base clause of conviction (pp. 60–61, 69–72; quoting D. T. Max). "A quick description of the shape of Infinite Jest" opens his summary of the three-story structure (p. 61).
• Three intertwined histories. The novel implicitly constructs a Künstlerroman (Hal’s tennis as a figure for Wallace’s writing), a history of contemporary fiction (the struggle to write after Barth/Pynchon/DeLillo, run through Westward and E Unibus Pluram), and a history of contemporary America in the middle of things — after the 1960s and the Cold War, the End of History (pp. 64–77). The volume’s title comes from the Westward line about a boy cocky enough "and ballpoint scepter, to wish to try to sing to the next generation" (p. 72).
• Against Burn’s self-erasure ending. Cohen accepts Stephen Burn’s observation that the novel inverts Portrait of the Artist (Joyce goes third-to-first person; the novel’s text goes first-person to third, ending on a trademarked corporation). But he argues that chronologically Hal’s last moments are the novel’s opening — the Year-of-Glad interview, where four of the first five paragraphs begin with the first-person singular pronoun. So Hal’s arc runs third to first, ending not in self-erasure but in a soul in here struggling to speak — an arc whose stakes are about expression (pp. 66–67; scene 003). This is Cohen’s distinctive move against Burn’s Bildungsroman-negation reading.
• The nonending as form. The withheld convergence — Hal’s condition never explained, the dug-up head and DMZ left hanging as deliberately unfired loaded rifles — is the shape of living in the middle of a history that feels both endless and closed; Cohen invokes Lethem’s The Ecstasy of Influence as the alternative to Bloom’s kill-the-father model Wallace was straining against (pp. 62–65, 74–76). On the last page we are left with Hal wandering "halls of the Academy, smiling unsettlingly" (p. 63).

Heather Houser, "Infinite Jest’s Environmental Case for Disgust" (pp. 118–142)

• The underexamined environmental novel. To understand the novel’s affective project "we must include the novel’s underexamined environmental relations in our interpretive purview." O.N.A.N.’s experialism — sending waste rather than seizing resources — and the ecological gerrymandering that bites the Great Concavity out of the map are the political expression of the same detachment that poisons the novel’s interpersonal relations (pp. 118, 123–25).
• Detachment as style, not only theme. Passive voice (Joelle’s overdose, where cocaine has figuratively amputated her limbs and severed her agency) and metaresponses (Geoffrey Day’s depression as the associated feelings) thread detachment into the novel’s grammar; "detachment is not only a psychological and ethical problem in Infinite" Jest but a spatial one too (pp. 120–22).
• Body and space cobuilt. Toxic bodies (Marathe’s skull-less wife, the Québecer mutants) register O.N.A.N.’s policy on flesh; conversely the built environment is rendered in medicalized anatomy (E.T.A. as a cardioid with tunnel veins and a "Lung"; M.I.T.’s Student Union is a cerebral cortex, not like one). Houser reads this against Lawrence Buell’s toxic discourse and Fredric Jameson’s mutation in built space (pp. 123–30).
• Disgust as engagement. Against Michiko Kakutani’s charge of uncontrolled excess, Houser argues "Infinite Jest promotes an unlikely emotion as a" conduit to the world beyond the self: disgust (Erdedy’s deliberate self-disgust; the Rabelaisian catalogs of poisoned bodies) is a force "that balances detachment and excessive attachment to aids to solipsism." — the novel’s sick aesthetic a "way out of the sicknesses endemic to postmodernity." (pp. 131–32, 128). She extends N. Katherine Hayles’s recursive-structure reading toward real ecologies.

Ed Finn, "Becoming Yourself: The Afterlife of Reception" (pp. 151–176)

• An empirical reception study: network analysis of Amazon purchase recommendations and of book co-occurrences in professional and consumer reviews, testing three conjectures — Wallace is different, postmodern, integral. Its findings: an unusually self-enclosed Wallace subnet (readers of one Wallace book buy another rather than branching out), with Infinite Jest the one node that behaves normally; Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (14 links) the persistent professional yardstick second only to Infinite Jest (17); and everyday readers reaching past the postmodernists to Hamlet, Ulysses, Moby-Dick, Les Misérables. Finn’s conjectures open with "Wallace employs a style wildly divergent from that of anyone else on the literary scene" (p. 152).
• Hamlet as the readers’ skeleton key and the annular re-reading experience: general readers repeatedly key the novel to Hamlet — "Hamlet haunts Infinite Jest, from its title to its antiheroes," a "narratological skeleton key", and the reviewer’s "This is the last page, but not the end of the story." — the title "which refers to the graveyard scene in Hamlet" (pp. 169–70) — where credentialed reviewers treat the play as superficial. Finn first published this study as a 2011 Stanford Literary Lab pamphlet.

Editorial / apparatus chapters

• Michael Pietsch, interviewed by Rick Moody, "Editing Wallace" (pp. 208–217). The primary firsthand account of editing the novel. Pietsch received ~150 pages in April 1992, got board approval over resistance, and agreed with Wallace that their job "was to subject every section of the book to the brutal question: can the" book live without this. He estimates around 250 "manuscript pages, though in an interview he said he thought it was 400." were cut. Pietsch wanted footnotes at the page bottom; Wallace insisted the notes "were there to stay and that they should be endnotes, not footnotes, so" readers could skip them and the page would not look intimidating. Pietsch reads the book’s "emotional core of the novel is this smart, funny, talented, frightened" young guy (Hal’s sadness), and notes that the apparently central plot question — what became of the deadly entertainment — is answered, insofar as it is, in an endnote, while the real question the main thread answers is whether Gately can survive being hit with the sadness he had staved off with narcotics.
• Ira B. Nadel, "Consider the Footnote" (pp. 218–240). Endnotes as a compositional and philosophical device. In April 1994 Wallace pitched endnotes to Pietsch — "I’ve become intensely attached to this" strategy, he wrote, and "strategy and will fight w/all 20 claws to preserve it." — arguing they would keep the primary text readable while mimicking information-flood and data triage. "But of course it was the 388 endnotes of Infinite Jest that caused the" greatest debate. Nadel catalogs their range (the filmography at n.24, the eighteen-page n.109 with its Avril→Orin letter, the Eschaton mathematics at n.123 — scene 073) as an aggressive knowledge system.
• Molly Schwartzburg, "Conclusion: Observations on the Archive at the Harry Ransom Center" (pp. 241–260). How Wallace’s papers were mediated at the HRC; notes the acquisition was seeded by Wallace’s letters found inside the DeLillo archive, that HRC staff formed their own Infinite Jest reading group (eleven readers, summer 2010), and that his instructions to copy editors survive as evidence of his lifelong interest in mediation.

Tributes and remarks (skimmed)

• Don DeLillo, memorial remarks (pp. 23–24): mostly on Everything and More, but glosses Infinite Jest as Wallace’s "dead serious frolic of addicted humanity."
• George Saunders, memorial remarks (pp. 53–55): Wallace as a wake-up artist and great American Buddhist writer; on Brief Interviews, not IJ.
• Rick Moody, family-memorial tribute (pp. 80–82): the Toronto anecdote where Wallace, pressed on the ending’s lack of closure, answered "Maybe you’re just not reading it right" — a reception datum on authorial intent for the ending.
• Jonathan Franzen, memorial remarks (pp. 177–181): the eulogy (kin to his separately held Farther Away). Recounts the Infinite Jest publication party Wallace survived by saying thank you again and again; reads the thousand pages that grow less and less funny until the book’s title "might just as well have been Infinite Sadness"; and closes on the novel’s "So yo then man what’s your story?" (IJ p. 17; scene 003).
• Paul Giles, "All Swallowed Up" (pp. 3–22): places Wallace in American literary history; Konstantinou draws on Giles’s line about Wallace mediating the dynamics of globalization. Josh Roiland (pp. 25–52): Wallace’s literary journalism via Nietzsche’s oblivion (Konstantinou’s "No Bull" borrows the denial-as-oblivion point; the earlier, shorter LJS 1.2 version of the same argument is now digested: roiland-getting-away-ljs). David Lipsky (pp. 113–117): a passage from the road-trip interview. Minimal standalone IJ content.

Theories & evidence

THEORY: The Entertainment ("Infinite Jest") is first an avant-garde act of communication and only then a weapon — James Incandenza built it to reach his son, not to destroy an audience

• Crux: entertainment-purpose
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [text] Konstantinou quotes the wraith: James spent his last sober days working "contrive a medium via which he [James] and the muted son [Hal] could" simply converse, to make something that would reverse thrust on "a young self’s fall into the womb of solipsism" — his most serious wish was to entertain. [IJ pp. 838–39; scene 162]
  • [text] The crib’s-eye infantilizing lens Joelle describes ("I don’t think there’s much doubt the lens" was meant to "reproduce an infantile visual field", IJ pp. 939–40) is read as the film simultaneously critiquing avant-garde self-involution and mass-media infantilization. [scene 178]
  • [secondary] Read through Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde: the film attacks the consumer where the historical avant-garde attacked the supply side, and its mere existence rebuts Bürger’s claim that art capable of touching lifeworlds is impossible. [pp. 98–99]
• Notes: Same crux the archive registers for the communication-vs-weapon question. Konstantinou lands firmly on the communication pole (the weapon use is the A.F.R.’s later appropriation). Houser and Cohen quote the identical wraith passage to the same end (the film as a failed act of care), so this block carries three same-volume witnesses. The essay raises no in-source denial; its own qualification is that the film nonetheless fails to reach Hal and misfires into mass addiction (Houser, p. 121).

THEORY: Infinite Jest is an engine of "postironic belief" — metafictional technique redirected from irony/disbelief toward faith, not another turn of meta-ironic negation

• Crux: cynicism-naivete
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [secondary] Konstantinou disputes A. O. Scott’s meta-irony and Boswell’s and Goerlandt’s meta-ironic readings; postirony "is the better term for Wallace’s project," aiming to decouple metafictional form from ironic knowingness so that a nonnaïve reader can be a noncynic. [pp. 89–91]
  • [text] Gately prays without belief and gets through the day clean (IJ pp. 443, 350); the reader’s relation to belief is meant to resemble Gately’s relation to God. [pp. 85–86]
  • [secondary] Octet and Good Old Neon puncture the fourth wall toward the author (asking to be believed) rather than the reader (asking to disbelieve) — Eshelman’s double framing / performatism. [pp. 93–98]
• Notes: Konstantinou himself names the counter-tension: Mary Holland’s reading that the novel is harshly critical of AA’s own solipsism and narcissism (quoted at p. 107 n.4), which he cites in order to resist. He also concedes the postirony project may be doomed to fail in strictly literal terms for lack of an institutional program, and that The Pale King addresses the structural causes more than Infinite Jest does (pp. 105–06, 109 n.13).

THEORY: Hal’s arc runs third-person to first, not first to third — the novel ends (chronologically, at its opening) on a soul struggling to speak, not on self-erasure

• Crux: annular-structure
• Stance: complicates
• Evidence:
  • [secondary] Cohen grants Stephen Burn’s observation that Infinite Jest inverts Portrait of the Artist (Joyce third→first; the novel’s text first→third, ending on a trademarked corporation) but argues Hal’s chronological last moments are the Year-of-Glad opening. [pp. 66–67]
  • [text] Four of the novel’s first five paragraphs begin with the first-person singular pronoun; Hal is in here, strapped down, struggling to find a new way to speak — an arc whose stakes are about expression. [scene 003; pp. 66–67]
• Notes: Complicates the annular reading rather than advancing a new ending-mechanics position: Cohen accepts the loop (the end returns readers to the opening) but reverses its valence from Burn’s self-erasure to prospective selfhood. Bears on the Bildungsroman/Künstlerroman question and on hal-dfw-surrogate (Hal’s development as an analog of Wallace’s). No claim about DMZ or the missing year is adjudicated; the dug-up head and DMZ are cited only as deliberately unfired loaded rifles (p. 63).

THEORY: Infinite Jest is an "integral" novel whose readers complete it — Hamlet is the general-reader skeleton key, and its last page loops to its first

• Crux: hamlet-frame
• Stance: endorses
• Evidence:
  • [secondary] Aggregated Amazon reviews repeatedly key Infinite Jest to Hamlet ("Hamlet haunts Infinite Jest, from its title to its antiheroes"; a "narratological skeleton key"), while credentialed reviewers treat the play as superficial. [pp. 169–70]
  • [secondary] A reviewer’s annular re-reading: "This is the last page, but not the end of the story." — the title "which refers to the graveyard scene in Hamlet." [pp. 169–70]
• Notes: A popularity datum (how widely the reading is held), not a new argument — and already carried by the archive’s pamphlet-based Finn note. Recorded here to confirm the Legacy (2012) chapter states the same, with minor wording changes from the pamphlet version. Also keys to reader-realization (the annular re-read) and encyclopedic-design / pynchon-influence (the Gravity’s Rainbow yardstick), as in the existing Finn note.

THEORY: The 2009 Infinite Summer group read realized Infinite Jest’s own aspiration — empathic connection not only between reader and text but among readers, made possible by the many-to-many network the novel failed to foresee

• Crux: reader-realization
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [secondary] The novel imagined media’s future as one-to-many broadcast (the teleputer only requests more); the actual Internet’s many-to-many read/write architecture produced the community the novel’s own model excluded. [pp. 197–98]
  • [text] The AA gloss "try to Identify instead of Compare," with Identify read as empathize (IJ p. 345), is offered as Wallace’s own theory of the painful opening to another that networked reading enacts. [pp. 198–99]
  • [secondary] The infinitedetox guest post ("My name is infinitedetox and I am an addict") is read as naïve over-identification corrected by the shared venue — evidence that the network, not the solitary book, does the ethical work. [pp. 194–95]
• Notes: A reception/reading-community thesis (W2 stratum), not a plot crux. Fitzpatrick raises her own counter-tensions: she flags the utopian-dream framing (Landsberg), the transference/over-identification danger (LaCapra), and (n.14) Jason Mittell’s point that television’s timed release may be more conducive to such communities, plus the open question whether Infinite Summer was repeatable (Dracula/2666 follow-ups thinned out). This is the archive’s richest scholarly account of the Infinite Summer read; distinct from the two held Fitzpatrick pieces (dupe delta below).

THEORY: Infinite Jest’s O.N.A.N. ecology and its disgust are central, not marginal — the novel makes an environmental case in which disgust is the affect of engagement

• Crux: manufactured-wasteland
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [text] Ecological gerrymandering and experialism bite the Great Concavity out of the map (IJ p. 403); toxic bodies (Marathe’s skull-less wife, IJ p. 779) register the policy on flesh, and built space is rendered in medical anatomy (E.T.A. as cardioid; M.I.T.’s Union is a cortex). [pp. 123–30]
  • [secondary] Extends N. Katherine Hayles’s recursive-structure reading toward real ecologies; reads via Buell’s toxic discourse and Jameson’s mutation in built space. [pp. 119, 128–30]
  • [inference] Against Kakutani’s self-indulgence charge, excess is read as control: disgust (Erdedy’s deliberate self-disgust) is a force "that balances detachment and excessive attachment to aids to solipsism." — the novel’s sick aesthetic a "way out of the sicknesses endemic to postmodernity." [pp. 131–32]
• Notes: A thematic reading keyed to the novel’s ecology and Concavity material. No in-source denial; the tension Houser herself raises is that the film never reaches Hal, so the novel does not escape the detachment it critiques (p. 121).

THEORY: The endnote apparatus is intentional structure — a "data triage" mimic that keeps the primary text readable while multiplying levels of thought

• Crux: endnotes-function
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [author] Wallace to Pietsch, April 1994: "I’ve become intensely attached to this" strategy, and "strategy and will fight w/all 20 claws to preserve it."; endnotes would make the primary text easier while mimicking information-flood and data triage (Nadel, quoting Max). [p. 219]
  • [secondary] Pietsch confirms Wallace insisted the notes "were there to stay and that they should be endnotes, not footnotes, so" the page would not look intimidating; and that the central plot question is answered, insofar as it is, in an endnote. [pp. 213–14]
  • [secondary] Nadel catalogs the range: "But of course it was the 388 endnotes of Infinite Jest that caused the" greatest debate (filmography n.24, 18-page n.109, Eschaton math n.123). [pp. 232–33]
• Notes: Compositional/authorial testimony (also feeds endnotes-structure and ij-cuts). This is firsthand where much registry material on the endnotes is secondhand; the Pietsch cut estimate (around 250 manuscript pages, vs Wallace’s remembered 400) is a direct datum for the ij-cuts crux and the 300–500-page myth. No in-source contradiction; Pietsch and Nadel differ only on which of them first resisted, not on the outcome.

Themes

Reception, canonization and community (Finn’s networks; Fitzpatrick’s Infinite Summer; Schwartzburg’s archive). Communication and solipsism (the whole volume’s keyword cluster; the Entertainment as JOI’s failed medium of contact). Irony and sincerity (Konstantinou’s postirony; the anti-rebel). Entertainment and the self (the film as avant-garde communication and as weapon; the crib lens). Addiction and recovery (Gately’s belief-without-belief; Identify-not-Compare; infinitedetox). Composition and publication history (Cohen’s 1989 crisis and influence-anxiety; Pietsch’s cuts; Nadel’s endnotes). Ecology and the Great Concavity (Houser’s experialism, ecological gerrymandering, disgust). Biography versus text and the ethics of reading a suicide’s work (Cohen, Fitzpatrick, Franzen, Saunders).

Cross-references

• finn-becoming-yourself-reception — the same essay in its 2011 pamphlet form; this volume is the published book version Finn’s note anticipated.
• konstantinou-world-of-dfw-boundary2-2013 — Konstantinou’s companion 2013 essay works the global/worldliness axis of Wallace’s post-postmodernism, where "No Bull" works the irony-to-belief axis; complementary, with little direct overlap on Infinite Jest specifics.
• infinite-summer-fitzpatrick-teaching-ij and memorial-fitzpatrick-requiescat-in-pace — two other Fitzpatrick pieces (her Infinite Summer teaching guest essay and her Pomona faculty memorial); the "Infinite Summer" chapter here is a third, distinct piece — the scholarly study of the group read.
• dfw-in-context-cambridge-2022 — the later reference collection this one precedes; several of its threads (the Reagan/O.N.A.N. politics, the wraith-as-author line) answer arguments begun here.
• In the novel: the Year-of-Glad opening interview (scene 003), Eschaton (scene 073), the wraith’s visit to Gately where James explains the film (scene 162), and Joelle’s Steeply interview describing the crib lens (scene 178).

Notable passages

"his dead serious frolic of addicted humanity." — Don DeLillo on Infinite Jest (p. 23)

"an ethos of postironic belief." — Konstantinou, on Wallace’s project (p. 85)

"as a terrorist weapon against American consumers." — Konstantinou on the A.F.R.’s use of the Entertainment (p. 101)

"was to subject every section of the book to the brutal question: can the" book live without this — Michael Pietsch on editing Infinite Jest (p. 211)

"I can give you 5000 words of theoretico-structural" arguments for this, but let’s spare one another — Wallace to Pietsch on a proposed cut (p. 213)

"strategy and will fight w/all 20 claws to preserve it." — Wallace to Pietsch on the endnotes, April 1994, quoted by Nadel (p. 219)

"Seattle blogger Matthew Baldwin launched Infinite Summer on" 1 June 2009 — Fitzpatrick (p. 192)

"My name is infinitedetox and I am an addict" — an Infinite Summer guest post, quoted by Fitzpatrick (p. 194)

"detachment is not only a psychological and ethical problem in Infinite" Jest but a spatial one — Houser (p. 119)

"might just as well have been Infinite Sadness" — Jonathan Franzen, memorial remarks (p. 179)

"Maybe you’re just not reading it right" — Wallace to a reader who wanted more closure at the ending, recalled by Rick Moody (p. 80)