Product Description
While scholars have analyzed the masculinity crisis portrayed in American fiction, few have focused on postmodernist fiction, few have examined masculinity without using feminist theory, and no articles propose a solution for ending traditional masculinity's dominance. I examine the masculinity crisis as it is portrayed in two postmodernist novels, David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest and Chuck Palahniuk's novel Fight Club. Both novels have male characters that ran the gamut of masculinities, but those that are the most successful at avoiding gender stereotypes develop a masculinity which incorporates strong, phallic masculinity and nurturing, testicular masculinity, creating a balanced masculinity. Also, both novels examine postmodernist fiction's future. Wallace and Palahniuk help reveal the future of postmodernist fiction: a post-postmodernist fiction that, like well-rounded masculinity, seeks to be more emotionally open while still using irony and innovation for meaningful effects, not just to be clever. This book aims to help gender scholars further develop their theories about masculinity, and show literature scholars the future of postmodernist fiction. ... Read more

Product Description
This study is an attempt at a reading of David FosterWallace's 1996 novel "Infinite Jest" that examinesthis massive work of fiction from a formal point ofview. After a discussion of Wallace's position inpostmodern literature the study takes a close look atsome salient stylistic features, especially thenovel's narrative technique. Thus, it exposes anunderlying formal structure in a novel whosestrategies of opacity and ambiguity have confused andfrustrated many readers. From this basis, the authordevelops a conception of "Infinite Jest" as a "novelof ideas" and examines themes the novel shares withPlato's "Republic". The final chapter deals withvarious notions of "performance" apparent in"Infinite Jest", such as role-playing, pretense,performance for an audience, and ritual. ... Read more

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Features a classic novella by Jerome Badanes and HelenThorpe on the murder of Ireland's most famous female journalist. PlusDelmore Schwartz on T.S. Eliot's squint. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

These tiny exceptions
How is it that the Final Opus of Leon Solomon is out of print in both hardcover and paperback?

The book's author, Jerome Badanes, died halfway through the sequel to The Final Opus of Leon Solomon. What he had written,and revised himself, was a pretty amazing 100 page novella called Change orDie which appears in Issue number #5 of Open City in its entirety.

It isalways a peculiar thing when you take a piece of writing that has so muchpeculiar character and substance, and lump it in with all the other stuffthat happens to comprise that issue of the magazine.

This issue has someabsurd wild cards - when seen in the light of its central feature,"Change or Die,"- such as an Irvine Welsh story he wroteshortly after completely Trainspotting, and this wonderful piece ofnon-sense that Delmore Schwartz wrote about T.S. Eliot's anti-Semitism.That is the one interesting thematic thread in this issue--Both Shwartz andthe academic protagonist of Change or Die (a man trying to recover fromShakespeare,) have a certain lovely fatedness about them.

And Change orDie has one of my favorite short lead sentences:

"The Blik familywas a dream and an education."

What a great beginning to such agreat story!

(And what a concise and honest use of the short sentence,which has been bastardized and beaten up on any number of fronts, fromHemingway imitators to the cold pragmatism of news providers).

If thiswhole computer as a means to shop for books is to have any good side, thenit is that finding a book like, "The Final Opus of Leon Solomon,"or getting your hands on the novella "Change of Die" is somethingyou MUST GET! If only to make use of the fact that you are sitting in frontof a computer and perusing.

Jerome Badanes. He is coming back in theonly way he can. ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document is an article from The Review of Contemporary Fiction, published by Review of Contemporary Fiction on June 22, 1993. The length of the article is 2001 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: From 'Infinite Jest.' (excerpt)
Author: David Foster Wallace
Publication: The Review of Contemporary Fiction (Refereed)
Date: June 22, 1993
Publisher: Review of Contemporary Fiction
Volume: v13Issue: n2Page: p195(4)

Article Type: Excerpt

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

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This is nonfiction commentary. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Chapters: A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, Consider the Lobster, Everything and More. Source: Wikipedia. Free updates online. Not illustrated. Excerpt: A Supposedly Fun Thing Ill Never Do Again is the title of a 1997 collection of non-fiction writing by David Foster Wallace. In the title essay, originally published as "Shipping Out" in Harper's, Wallace describes what he sees as the middlebrow excesses exhibited during his one week trip aboard a cruise ship (MV Zenith, which he rechristens the Nadir) in the Caribbean. His ironic displeasure with the professional hospitality industry and the "fun" he should be having unveils how the indulgences of the cruise turn him into a spoiled brat, leading to overwhelming internal despair. Wallace uses footnotes extensively throughout the piece for various asides. Like much of Wallace's work, the essay is written in post-modern style. Another essay in the same volume takes on the vulgarities and excesses of the Illinois State Fair. This collection also includes Wallace's influential essay "E Unibus Pluram" regarding television's impact on contemporary literature and the use of irony within American culture. Essays collected in the book: The following excerpt from the title essay illustrates Wallace's style and use of footnotes: "... advertisement that pretends to be art is, at absolute best, like somebody who smiles warmly at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what's sinister is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us: since it offers a perfect facsimile or simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill's real spirit, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It makes us feel confus...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=1336578 ... Read more

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Aus Wikipedia. Nicht dargestellt. Auszug: David Foster Wallace (February 21, 1962 - September 12, 2008) was an American author of novels, essays, and short stories, and a professor at Pomona College in Claremont, California. He was widely known for his 1996 novel Infinite Jest, which Time included in its All-Time 100 Greatest Novels list (covering the period 1923-2006). Los Angeles Times book editor David Ulin called Wallace "one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last 20 years." Wallace was born in Ithaca, New York to James Donald Wallace and Sally Foster Wallace. In his early childhood, Wallace lived in Champaign, Illinois. In fourth grade, he moved to Urbana and attended Yankee Ridge school. As an adolescent, Wallace was a regionally ranked junior tennis player. He was "a rare combination of sporting and academic prowess. His was an omnivorous brain, able to ingest complex mathematics, logic and philosophy. Wallace was so uncomfortable among strangers that his shyness was its own defensive barrier." He attended his father's alma mater, Amherst College, and majored in English and philosophy, with a focus on modal logic and mathematics. His philosophy senior thesis on modal logic, titled Richard Taylor's 'Fatalism' and the Semantics of Physical Modality (described in James Ryerson's 2008 New York Times essay "Consider the Philosopher") was awarded the Gail Kennedy Memorial Prize. His other senior thesis, in English, would later become his first novel. Wallace graduated with summa cum laude honors for both theses in 1985, and in 1987 received a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from the University of Arizona. Wallace's father, James Wallace, having finished his graduate course work in philosophy at Cornell University, accepted a teaching job at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the fall of 1962. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell in 1963. His mother, Sally Foster Wallace, attended gradu...http://booksllc.net/?l=de ... Read more