Making Students' Heads Throb Heartlike: David Foster Wallace's Infinitely Healing Pedagogy

TL;DR

Tony McMahon's essay on teaching Wallace — a practitioner's account of using Wallace's fiction, essays, and pedagogical materials in the creative-writing classroom to make students' "heads throb heartlike" (Wallace's own phrase for what good fiction should do). It advances essentially no new reading of Infinite Jest itself; its value to this archive is biographical and reception-side. On the biography: McMahon draws on the Harry Ransom Center archive (Wallace's playful and erudite "course guides, reading lists and pop quizzes"; his heavily annotated teaching copies of Carrie and Silence of the Lambs as evidence of "not being a snob in the classroom"; and — via the DFW Reader's teaching-materials chapter — that, according to his mother, Wallace "would read every piece of undergraduate writing he marked three times…"). On reception: McMahon usefully collects the hostile pole — Bret Easton Ellis calling Wallace "a complete fraud" (in Vice) and telling the Irish Times he "tried to read Infinite Jest three or four times and never cracked it" — and re-cites Kakutani's "loose baggy monster", against Boswell's "a masterpiece" and McMahon's own claim that IJ is "the defining text of postmodernism" that "began the movement" to Kelly's post-postmodernism / new sincerity.

Key claims

• The pedagogy thesis. "[R]eading, writing and healing - for Wallace and for students of his work - cannot be separated"; Wallace's practice offers "as yet unmapped opportunities for teaching," culminating in playing students the "This is Water" Kenyon address on the last day of term.
• HRC teaching materials as evidence of Wallace-the-teacher. The Ransom Center holds "extraordinarily intricate and playful and erudite course guides, reading lists and pop quizzes"; the heavily annotated Carrie and Silence of the Lambs argue there is something quite profound about "not being a snob in the classroom"; per his mother, Wallace "would read every piece of undergraduate writing he marked three times…" (the saved raw ends mid-sentence exactly there — see the truncation flag below).
• The Wallace-Studies survey. McMahon maps the emerging field (Boswell 2003; Hering 2010; Cohen & Konstantinou 2012; Boswell & Burn's Companion 2013; Boswell's Long Thing 2014; den Dulk; the philosophy volumes) and Adam Kelly's "interview-essay nexus" / "diagnosis and cure" framing of Wallace's project.
• Reception, both poles. IJ is "a masterpiece" (Boswell) and, for McMahon, "the defining text of postmodernism"; against this the hostile pole — Ellis's "complete fraud" (Vice) and never-"cracked"-it (Irish Times), and Kakutani's "loose baggy monster" that was "written and edited (or not edited) on the principle that bigger is better, more means more important".
• The title epigraph. Wallace's aim that fiction make "heads throb heartlike" (Burn 2012) and his dictum "Fiction's about what it means to be a fucking human being".

Theories & evidence

THEORY: Wallace's project — including Infinite Jest — is "diagnosis and cure," fiction as ethical intervention and healing rather than aesthetic representation; IJ inaugurates the move from postmodernism to new sincerity

• Crux: irony-vs-recovery
• Stance: mentions
• Evidence:
  • [secondary] Adam Kelly: Wallace's "project" is "that fiction should act as both 'diagnosis and cure,' that it should be viewed not primarily in terms of aesthetic representation, but of ethical intervention." [sec. 1]
  • [inference] McMahon labels IJ "the defining text of postmodernism in that it began the movement away from that theoretical construct to … post-postmodernism or new sincerity." [sec. 1]
  • [secondary] Mary K. Holland: Wallace converts Baudrillard's simulacra "into a method for sculpting through fiction a powerful human presence … [that] makes her feel … less alone." [sec. 2]
• Notes: A name-check of the new-sincerity / healing reading in service of a pedagogy argument, not a developed IJ reading — hence mentions. The essay's in-built counter-pole (Ellis's "complete fraud," Kakutani's "not edited") is the hostile-reception counterweight, recorded per the counterevidence clause. This note otherwise advances no IJ-specific theory (its subject is teaching and reception).

Themes

Pedagogy and healing (Wallace-as-teacher); biography (the HRC teaching archive, the three-times-marking practice); reception (the hostile pole — Ellis, Kakutani — vs. the masterpiece consensus); new sincerity / diagnosis-and-cure; This Is Water and attention.

Cross-references

• The held teaching material: canavan-ij-syllabus (Wallace's own IJ-adjacent syllabus) and the Lipsky record (lipsky-becoming-yourself; the "grunge American novel" framing McMahon repeats via Bruni).
• The reception poles: Kakutani's "loose baggy monster" review (McMahon re-cites it) and the hostile-dissent line (peck-well-duh-1996) — Ellis's "complete fraud" is a NET-NEW hostile datum joining that pole.
• The new-sincerity framing: kelly-dialectic-of-sincerity, kelly-death-of-the-author, irony-and-sincerity; Boswell: boswell-understanding-dfw.

Notable passages

Verbatim from the essay (McMahon's prose or his quotations, as marked).

• The title phrase: good fiction should make "heads throb heartlike".
• Wallace's dictum: "Fiction's about what it means to be a fucking human being".
• Ellis (via Vice): "I think David Foster Wallace is a complete fraud."
• Ellis (via the Irish Times): "I tried to read Infinite Jest three or four times and never cracked it."
• Kakutani, re-cited: IJ a "loose baggy monster".
• McMahon's claim: IJ is "the defining text of postmodernism".