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The Voices of David Foster Wallace: Comic, Encyclopedic, Sincere

Hoffman, Yonina A
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1342-0990
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1565611733072015

Abstract Details

2019, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, English.
The power and intimacy of Wallace’s narrative voices allow him to affect his readers powerfully on multiple levels: cognitively, linguistically, and affectively. The Voices of David Foster Wallace: Comic, Encyclopedic, and Sincere offers a systematic analysis of Wallace’s poetics of voice, identifying a dominant voice for each, pinpointing its techniques and influences, and casting it in a career arc of Wallace’s evolving novelistic purposes. The careful shaping of voice is central to Wallace’s distinctive prose and its impact on contemporary American fiction. The project identifies Wallace’s three dominant voices—comic, encyclopedic, and sincere—and shows how voice identifies not just the particular agent communicating with the reader but creates a global atmosphere in texts, deeply shaping our experiences and interpretations. Drawing on and refining James Phelan’s model of voice for Wallace’s fiction, I define voice as the synthesis of values, tone, style, and rhythm, elements that come together in complex ways to create the gestalt effect of narrative voice. I develop tools for examining the micro elements that create the macro quality of the reading experience—helping illuminate how Wallace uses voice to “rewire” the way readers see and feel, changing our relation to language and to the world. Further, I emphasize the sonic dimension of reading whereby Wallace’s sentence and paragraph rhythms impact the cognition of readers, thus joining the recent turn in literary studies toward reading with the grain, by advancing and synthesizing approaches to rhetoric, affect, formalism, and literary phenomenology. The picture of Wallace that emerges from my analysis is one of uncertainty (and ambition) regarding his place in the literary world, a restless desire to add more voices to his repertoire. Adopting comedy, knowledge, and finally emotional depth as his purposes, Wallace progressively widens his ideal audience, reaching readers in a variety of ways in his ongoing project to create fiction that will be an “anodyne against loneliness” (Kennedy/Polk 16). These different modes, with their range of affective commitments, underscore the deeply social (and thus implicitly communal and political) nature of narrative voice as a tool for authors. Thus The Voices of David Foster Wallace offers a multi-layered argument that advances not just Wallace studies, but the study of rhetoric in fiction, prose poetics, and readerly affect. That Wallace’s career has an immense influence on current (and future) American literature cannot be overstated; The Voices of David Foster Wallace aims to be a vital intervention in Wallace studies and a substantial contribution to American literary history.
Brian McHale (Advisor)
James Phelan (Committee Member)
Sandra Macpherson (Committee Member)
314 p.
American Literature; Language; Literature
narrative voice; ethics; David Foster Wallace; Infinite Jest; Broom of the System; The Pale King; narration; rhetorical narrative theory; prose rhythm; rhetoric; style; tone; values; rhythm; Updike; Pynchon; Joyce; comic; encyclopedic; sincerity; affect

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Hoffman, Y. A. (2019). The Voices of David Foster Wallace: Comic, Encyclopedic, Sincere [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1565611733072015

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Hoffman, Yonina. The Voices of David Foster Wallace: Comic, Encyclopedic, Sincere. 2019. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1565611733072015.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Hoffman, Yonina. "The Voices of David Foster Wallace: Comic, Encyclopedic, Sincere." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2019. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1565611733072015

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1565611733072015
644
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This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.