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Tuesday, May 26, 2009

It's Coming! Footnotes: New Directions in David Foster Wallace Studies

Footnotes: New Directions in David Foster Wallace Studies

This looks seriously awesome! More details below:

"The critical discussion of David Foster Wallace has thus far been
limited to a few aspects of his most popular works. Our conference
seeks to expand the response beyond the popular imagination’s
categories of “difficult,” “postmodern,” and “genius,” and beyond the
author’s own articulation of his project as a response to irony. We
invite a reconsideration of Wallace with an emphasis on new
perspectives of his entire oeuvre.


The Graduate Center of the City University of New York is pleased to
announce a one-day conference devoted to the discussion of Wallace’s
work, to be held Friday, November 20th 2009, from 9 am to 5 pm. Please
send your abstracts of no more than 250-words by August 15th, along
with contact info and institutional affiliation (if any), to: footnotesconference@gmail.com.

We welcome papers exploring any aspect of Wallace’s work. Some suggested directions:

1) Reconsideration of Wallace’s Oeuvre: Papers examining Wallace’s
neglected early works Broom of the System and Girl with Curious Hair;
new perspectives on Infinite Jest; the direction of Wallace’s later
work.


2) Wallace’s Literary Context: The reception of Wallace’s work and
the way his image has been shaped by his fans, the media, and the
academy; examinations of Wallace’s relation to his literary forebears,
both 20th century and earlier; Wallace outside the bounds of
“postmodernism”; Wallace’s influence on contemporary literature.


3) Theorizing Wallace: Wallace’s treatment of language and formal or
figurative qualities in Wallace’s writing; applications of narrative
theory to Wallace’s texts or consideration of his narrative
innovations; Wallace’s analytic, phenomenological, or existential
contexts; treatment of the self and subjectivity; relation to
ethics/values/morality; feminism and gender issues.


4) Interdisciplinary Approaches to Wallace: The use of math, logic,
philosophy, science, technology, politics, sociology, psychology, law,
etc. in Wallace’s work; pedagogical issues related to Wallace’s work."

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