Global Wallace ─ David Foster Wallace and World Literature

David Foster Wallace is invariably seen as an emphatically American figure. Lucas Thompson challenges this consensus, arguing that Wallace's various engagements with global texts are central to his literary practice and to his critique of US culture. Thompson shows how, time and again, Wallace's fiction draws on a diverse range of global texts, appropriating various forms of world literature in the attempt to craft fiction that critiques US culture from oblique and unexpected vantage points.

Using a wide range of comparative case studies, and drawing on extensive archival research, Global Wallace reveals Wallace's substantial debts to such unexpected figures as Jamaica Kincaid, Julio Cortázar, Jean Rhys, Leo Tolstoy, Nikolai Gogol, Peter Weiss, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, among many others. It also offers a more comprehensive account of the key influences that other Wallace scholars have already perceived, such as Fyodor Dostoevsky, Franz Kafka, and Manuel Puig. Reassessing Wallace's body of work in relation to five broadly construed geographical territories-Latin America, Russia, Eastern Europe, France, and Africa-reveals the particular mechanisms through which Wallace played particular literary traditions off one another, showing how he appropriated vastly different global texts within his own fiction. By expanding the geographical coordinates of Wallace's work in this way, Global Wallace reconceptualizes contemporary American fiction, as being embedded within a global exchange of texts and ideas.