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Contemporary Literature Videos 18 videos
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Contemporary Literature 16 David Foster Wallace 92 Views
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Description:
David Foster Wallace, author of Infinite Jest , had a fondness for footnotes. 1
Transcript
- 00:00
Thank you We sneak in contemporary literature david foster wallace
- 00:09
ala shmoop who is david foster wallace David foster wallace
- 00:15
is a member of generation acts which is the generation
- 00:18
that came of age in the nineteen nineties and is
- 00:21
very famously cynical They don't like consumerism they don't like
Full Transcript
- 00:26
it when you try to sell them things or tell
- 00:27
them to do things David foster wallace is definitely skeptical
- 00:32
of popular culture he has a famous essay on television
- 00:37
that talks about basically how it makes us feel less
- 00:42
generous and sympathetic and it makes us all very like
- 00:44
detached and they're cool He is well known for his
- 00:49
novels most famously infinite jest which was published in the
- 00:54
mid nineteen nineties and is the only word i have
- 00:57
Bird is it's like an encyclopedia its huge novel full
- 01:02
of footnotes Actually they're almost almost as much space is
- 01:06
devoted to the footnotes is the text in some parts
- 01:09
and more in other parts Andi it's an expansive story
- 01:13
about a child tennis star and a lot of other
- 01:17
viewable it's about depression It's about money it's about american
- 01:22
life it's just a really intense novel he wrote a
- 01:27
couple of other novels The broom of the system and
- 01:29
the pale king which was published after his death He
- 01:32
is also really well known for his essays with tend
- 01:36
to take pretty ordinary things about the united states and
- 01:41
he makes really thoughtful and deep meditations on what it
- 01:47
means to be human Basically so this is a genius
- 01:52
who was very sad but he's also incredibly warm hearted
- 01:58
and you especially see in his later essays on a
- 02:02
very famous graduation speech who once gave that he really
- 02:06
believes in the goodness of people and he believes that
- 02:11
we can have good lives He predicted in the mid
- 02:15
nineties that there would be a turn in american fiction
- 02:19
and that people would start writing fiction that was less
- 02:22
self consciously cool and mohr invested in everyday life and
- 02:28
things that were normal and ordinary and nice Uh and
- 02:33
he inspired a lot of writers to go down that
- 02:35
path So recent novelists like jonathan safran foer or even
- 02:42
jonathan franzen have all been really influenced By david foster
- 02:46
wallace What is generation x and how does david foster
- 02:52
wallace relate to it What is unusual about infinite jest
- 02:57
What are some characteristics of david foster Wallace is writing
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