Kathleen Fitzpatrick: On Teaching Infinite Jest (Infinite Summer guest essay)

TL;DR

Guest essay (07.17.09) by the Pomona professor who taught a full-semester DFW single-author course the spring after Wallace's death — and who was his actual department colleague. Valuable both as pedagogy (how to pace and frame IJ) and as a methodological warning against reading the book as suicide-note autobiography.

Key claims

• She opened her course with Wimsatt & Beardsley's "intentional fallacy," Wallace's Joseph Frank/Dostoevsky essay, and the McCaffery interview, to force the distinction between "Wallace" (the author-construct in the text) and "Dave" (the person) — and to head off mining the work for suicide/depression foreshadowing.
• Core methodological claim: reading the texts as "evidence of the tragedy to come" sells them short and misses that imaginative identification with others "was precisely what had kept Dave alive"; focus on the texts' search for human connection rather than its failures.
• She previously taught IJ in a "Big Novel" course alongside Gravity's Rainbow, Underworld, and Cryptonomicon (post-WWII encyclopedic-novel framing). In that company IJ stood out as the one "most about us and who we are right now... where we're going if we don't watch out."
• Reading IJ in the context of Wallace's own oeuvre instead shifts the emphasis to his recurring philosophical problem: self and other as mediated by language — "the impossibility of ever really saying what you mean, coupled with the absolute necessity of trying to do so anyhow."
• Practical pacing model: start IJ mid-semester in chronological sequence with the other works but stretch it across the rest of the term, ~100 pages/week alongside one other book per week — a useful schedule for any structured read.
• Anecdote: a student asked why she never invited Wallace to class; mutual self-consciousness made both pretend the course didn't exist — he didn't want to be the Famous Author of Infinite Jest in the building where he taught.

Themes

Communication/solipsism (her course's organizing theme); entertainment and the encyclopedic-novel tradition; biography vs. text (directly relevant to how this project should treat post-2008 readings of the ending and of Kate Gompert/Hal's depression material).

Cross-references

• The McCaffery interview and the Dostoevsky essay belong in the interviews-context category as primary frame texts.
• infinite-summer-how-to-read-ij — she was one of its three contributors; her course wiki is in its tip 11.
• Pynchon/DeLillo encyclopedic-novel comparison connects to Burn's academic framing in print-companions-carlisle-burn.
• infinite-summer-pietsch-editing-ij — the other top-tier Infinite Summer guest essay.

Notable passages

"...the act of imaginative identification with someone outside himself was precisely what had kept Dave alive, and that we owed it to the texts to focus on their search for human connection rather than its failures."

"...the relationship between self and other as mediated by language, or perhaps that relationship as complicated by the impossibility of ever really saying what you mean, coupled with the absolute necessity of trying to do so anyhow."

"[IJ was] the one that seemed to be most about us and who we are right now, but... not about how we got here, but where we're going if we don't watch out."