A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again Essays and Arguments Tag - Author of Infinite Jest

by Wallace, David Foster

• ISBN13: 9780316919890
• ISBN10: 0316919896
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1997-02-01
• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Summary

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again collects David Foster Wallace's writings on a range of subjects that only he could bring together. From personal narratives to tennis, film, philosophy, and postmodern literary theory, no subject is outside the play of his imagination. In "Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All", a finalist for the 1995 National Magazine Award, Wallace gorges himself on corn dogs, gawks at baton twirlers, and gropes toward the true meaning of the all-American Institution the State Fair. In the title essay, one of the most talked about (and frequently photocopied) nonfiction pieces of the-year, Wallace reports with excruciating humor the agonies of enduring forced fun on a commercial cruiseliner. Wallace's sports obsession comes out in an essay about the unfathomable gulf between professional tennis players and the merely excellent. "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction" explores the deep currents affecting both popular arts and literary craft, while "David Lynch Keeps His Head" is at once a portrait of the artist at work and an appreciation of the far-reaching cultural influence a popular artist can have.

Author Biography

David Foster Wallace was born in Ithaca, New York, in 1962 and raised in Illinois, where he was a regionally ranked junior tennis player. He received bachelor of arts degrees in philosophy and English from Amherst College and wrote what would become his first novel, The Broom of the System, as his senior English thesis. He received a masters of fine arts from University of Arizona in 1987 and briefly pursued graduate work in philosophy at Harvard University. His second novel, Infinite Jest, was published in 1996. Wallace taught creative writing at Emerson College, Illinois State University, and Pomona College, and published the story collections Girl with Curious Hair, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Oblivion, the essay collections A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, and Consider the Lobster. He was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, and a Whiting Writers' Award, and was appointed to the Usage Panel for The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. He died in 2008. His last novel, The Pale King, was published in 2011.

Table of Contents

1 Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley	3	(18)
2 E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction	21	(62)
3 Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All	83	(55)
4 Greatly Exaggerated	138	(8)
5 David Lynch Keeps His Head	146	(67)
6 Tennis Player Michael Joyce's Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness	213	(43)
7 A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again	256