English Honors seminar course on David Foster Wallace gives undergraduates a look into Wallace's archive

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TL;DR

A short Ransom Center Magazine piece by UT undergraduate intern Emily Neie on Heather Houser's fall-2012 English Honors seminar on Wallace, which brought undergraduates into the archive twice to view the marginalia, editorial correspondence, and research books behind Infinite Jest. Slight but useful as early evidence of the novel entering the university classroom via the archive — with Houser's teacherly summary of what the papers show ("a painstaking writer and reader. Writing was a laborious, often distressing process for Wallace.") and a cameo of Jenn Shapland, then the graduate intern, presenting Wallace's annotated books.

Key claims

UT Austin ran an English Honors seminar on Wallace (fall 2012, Prof. Heather Houser) with two class visits to the Ransom Center to view archive pulls: "marginalia written in miniscule handwriting, correspondence with editors and fans, and annotations in books that he used for research."
Houser on the archive's pedagogical point: "Wallace's letters, manuscripts, and notes show him to be a painstaking writer and reader. Writing was a laborious, often distressing process for Wallace. Students see this in the sheaves of drafts and series of letters between Wallace and his editors and friends."
The course scaffolded students into the novel — Wallace's style introduced "in shorter, more light-hearted bursts" before Infinite Jest (Neie's own first Wallace was the title essay of A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again), the novel then read in segments with discussion; classmate Aaron Levine: "We as a class are privileged... most people who read Infinite Jest do not get to read it in segments and then have hour-and-a-half conversations with a room full of inquisitive minds."
Photo captions place Jenn Shapland ("Graduate intern Jenn Shapland, center, shares annotated books from Wallace's library and research materials he used while writing "Infinite Jest."") and "a cinema book that Wallace read while working on "Infinite Jest."" in the sessions — small documentary traces of the research-library holdings.

Themes

Teaching Wallace and the classroom life of Infinite Jest; the archive as pedagogy (the human, laborious writer behind the finished book); reception — the novel's institutionalization within a few years of the archive's opening.

Cross-references

themillions-shapland-cataloging-pale-king — Shapland, photographed here presenting the library, had published her own cataloging essay the month before (October 2012); the two pieces together date her HRC tenure.
rcmag-barnard-20-years-ij — the editorial correspondence Houser's students handled is the material Barnard quotes.
The cinema-book caption is a small corroborating trace of the film-theory research layer behind the novel's filmography apparatus.

Notable passages

Houser: "Wallace's letters, manuscripts, and notes show him to be a painstaking writer and reader. Writing was a laborious, often distressing process for Wallace."
Levine: "most people who read Infinite Jest do not get to read it in segments and then have hour-and-a-half conversations with a room full of inquisitive minds."