DFW Conference

CUNY  (or at least a couple of particularly intrepid graduate students at CUNY) are hosting a one-day conference on Wallace and his work.  Read the entire call for papers here, but a few highlights are as follows:

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.

The deadline for 250-word proposals is this coming Friday, 8/15.

DFW Interviews

Newly added to the sidebar under resources: the David Foster Wallace Audio Project, a clearing house of audio interviews.  In addition to being a great resource, it handily marks many of them with the subject matter (note two under “Infinite Jest”).