Ordinary Unhappiness: The Therapeutic Fiction of David Foster Wallace (Square One: First-Order Questions in the Humanities)
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- Synopsis
- In recent years, the American fiction writer David Foster Wallace has been treated as a symbol, as an icon, and even a film character. Ordinary Unhappiness returns us to the reason we all know about him in the first place: his fiction. By closely examining Infinite Jest, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and The Pale King, Jon Baskin points readers to the work at the center of Wallace's oeuvre and places that writing in conversation with a philosophical tradition that includes Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard, and Cavell, among others. What emerges is a Wallace who not only speaks to our postmodern addictions in the age of mass entertainment and McDonald's but who seeks to address a quiet desperation at the heart of our modern lives. Freud said that the job of the therapeutic process was to turn "hysterical misery into ordinary unhappiness." This book makes a case for how Wallace achieved this in his fiction.
- Copyright:
- 2019
Book Details
- Book Quality:
- Publisher Quality
- Book Size:
- 200 Pages
- ISBN-13:
- 9781503609310
- Related ISBNs:
- 9781503608337, 9781503609303, 9781503608337, 9781503609303
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- Date of Addition:
- 05/26/22
- Copyrighted By:
- the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.
- Adult content:
- No
- Language:
- English
- Has Image Descriptions:
- No
- Categories:
- Nonfiction, Literature and Fiction, Language Arts, Philosophy
- Submitted By:
- Bookshare Staff
- Usage Restrictions:
- This is a copyrighted book.
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