IJ study archive

David Foster Wallace: the Death of the Author and the Birth of a Discipline

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TL;DR

The essay that named and mapped Wallace Studies a year and a half after Wallace's death — the standard reference for how the field formed. Kelly surveys the criticism from the early 1990s to 2009, argues that the essay-interview nexus ("E Unibus Pluram" plus the McCaffery interview) became the "inescapable point of departure" for reading Wallace, and diagnoses the field's defining feature: a near-universal critical agreement with Wallace's own premise that fiction is "diagnosis and cure", ethical intervention rather than aesthetic representation. Its interpretive throughline — built from Zadie Smith, Timothy Aubry, Frank Cioffi, and Kelly's own New Sincerity work — is that Wallace's method turns the reading experience back on the reader ("It’s our character that’s being investigated"), so the essay doubles as an argument that his fiction stages the death of the author in favour of language living "through the reader". More a historiography of the discipline than a reading of any plot crux; its value is as the origin map of academic Wallace criticism and as an early, influential statement of the thesis that Wallace's fiction does its ethical work on the reader.

Key claims

  • Wallace Studies as a field. By 2010, with Wallace criticism "into its third decade", Kelly offers "an initial map of the territory" of what he terms Wallace Studies. He inventories the 2009 mobilization — the Pomona and Trinity courses, Infinite Summer, the Krasinski Brief Interviews film, the Liverpool "Consider David Foster Wallace" and CUNY "Footnotes" conferences, the MLA panel.
  • The internet author. Wallace "was the first major writer to live and die in the internet age"; the wallace-l listserv and Nick Maniatis's The Howling Fantods made him, uniquely, the internet's own — "No other literary writer can be said to be the internet’s own in quite the same way" — an irony, since his fiction is about a television-and-gaze world.
  • The essay-interview nexus. From Boswell's and Burn's 2003 books onward, "E Unibus Pluram" and the McCaffery interview became "an inescapable point of departure". Kelly's periodization is offered as a conditional: if the "second wave of Wallace scholarship, profoundly influenced by his essay-interview, might be said to begin with Scott’s piece in 2000", then it can be seen as "reaching its peak in 2009".
  • Intention reborn. Where theory once meant "the conclusive destruction of intention, the final nail in the coffin of Barthes’s dead author", Wallace criticism births intention again: because Wallace is assumed to have read the theorists (Heidegger, Derrida, Wittgenstein, et al.), critics read him "engaging in implicit dialogue with them", using theory to emphasize "Wallace’s own assimilation and response to it".
  • Diagnosis and cure / the ethical turn. The field's "most striking feature" is the implicit agreement with Wallace's premise that fiction is "diagnosis and cure", ethical intervention over aesthetic representation (Baskin: "Wallace’s therapeutic art always treated pain as a symptom of distress, confusion and isolation"). Kelly situates this against the "ethical turn" in criticism (Booth/Nussbaum's Aristotelianism; Attridge/Coetzee's poststructuralist alterity), arguing Wallace shifts the emphasis from otherness to "some sort of weird ambient sameness in different kinds of human relationships".
  • The reader investigated. Following Zadie Smith — "His stories simply don’t investigate character... Instead they’re turned outwards, towards us. It’s our character that’s being investigated" — Kelly gathers the field's accounts of reader-implication: Cioffi's "Infinite Jest forces the reader to recognise the kind of behaviour she is engaged in", Jacobs's "participatory aesthetic", Boswell's "the world outside Wallace’s books is always the reader’s interior", and Aubry's reading of the one "prodigiously long sentence" on AA recovery (IJ 350-51) whose "temporal experience of reading" the sentence "mimics the arduous experience of recovering in AA".
  • New Sincerity as ethical undecidability. Kelly foregrounds his own Liverpool argument that Wallace's "New Sincerity" "depends upon a kind of ethical undecidability in his work", which opens a space for the reader to inhabit and challenges "the investment in writerly mastery".
  • The death of the author, embraced. Kelly closes on Wallace's own McCaffery line — once he is done with the thing, the text becomes "simply language, and language lives not just in but through the reader" — reading Wallace Studies itself as the reader taking up the conversation the dialogic fiction invited.

Theories & evidence

THEORY: Wallace's fiction investigates the reader rather than the character — its ethics are enacted on the reader ("It’s our character that’s being investigated"), which is what makes his work stage a productive death of the author

  • Crux: reader-realization
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [secondary] Zadie Smith: "Instead they’re turned outwards, towards us. It’s our character that’s being investigated" (Smith 276), marshaled by Kelly as the field's central insight. [sec. reader-writer]
    • [secondary] The corroborating chain: Cioffi ("Infinite Jest forces the reader to recognise the kind of behaviour she is engaged in"), Jacobs's "participatory aesthetic", Boswell's "the world outside Wallace’s books is always the reader’s interior". [sec. reader-writer]
    • [text] Aubry's reading of the page-long AA-recovery sentence (IJ 350-51): its "temporal experience of reading" the sentence "mimics the arduous experience of recovering in AA", putting the reader "in the position of the addict". [sec. reader-writer]
    • [author] Wallace's own gloss (McCaffery): once the author is done, "language lives not just in but through the reader". [sec. conclusion]
  • Notes: The archive's reader-realization reading, here given its field-survey genealogy rather than a fresh close reading. Counterweight recorded in-source: Kelly notes Baskin's alternative (the difficulty is partly just a filter for "a certain kind of reader accustomed to reading long difficult novels"), and flags that the "ethical undecidability" is his own claim, not a settled field consensus.

THEORY: The reading experience of Infinite Jest models the recovery it depicts — the long AA sentence puts the reader through the addict's arduous process

  • Crux: reading-as-rehab
  • Stance: endorses
  • Evidence:
    • [secondary] Aubry (via Kelly): the "temporal experience of reading" the IJ 350-51 sentence "mimics the arduous experience of recovering in AA"; the reader, "like the addict", must choose whether to embrace this "paradoxical logic whereby a surrender of volition leads to freedom". [sec. reader-writer]
    • [text] "don’t compare, identify" is named as one of AA's slogans in Infinite Jest — Kelly's link between the AA method and the reader's empathetic implication. [sec. reader-writer]
  • Notes: The strongest scholarly endorsement the archive holds for the reading-as-rehab reading — earlier sightings were podcast discussions with split verdicts. Kelly does not himself argue it at length; he relays and endorses Aubry's version. No in-source denial raised.

Themes

Reception and field-formation (the master theme — the birth of Wallace Studies); the reader-writer relation (reader-implication, the death of the author, participatory aesthetic); ethics and literary theory (the ethical turn; sameness vs. alterity; intention reborn); addiction and recovery (only via Aubry's AA-sentence reading); irony and sincerity (New Sincerity as ethical undecidability); media and the internet (Wallace as the internet's author).

Cross-references

Notable passages

Verbatim from the essay (Kelly's own prose unless marked; this raw uses curly quotes and apostrophes, reproduced byte-exact below).

  • The field: "an initial map of the territory" of what Kelly terms Wallace Studies.
  • The internet author: "No other literary writer can be said to be the internet’s own in quite the same way".
  • The nexus: the "essay-interview nexus" as an "inescapable point of departure"; the second wave "might be said to begin with Scott’s piece in 2000".
  • The field's premise: fiction as "diagnosis and cure".
  • Zadie Smith, quoted: "It’s our character that’s being investigated".
  • Aubry, quoted: the "temporal experience of reading" the sentence "mimics the arduous experience of recovering in AA".
  • Kelly's own thesis named: Wallace's "New Sincerity" "depends upon a kind of ethical undecidability in his work".
  • The close (Wallace via McCaffery): "language lives not just in but through the reader".

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