Staiger, Jeff
https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/handle/1794/9681
2024-03-29T12:15:12Z“Turning a Man’s Life Right Around”: Wallace’s Rehabilitation of Frederick Exley in IJ
https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/handle/1794/26604
“Turning a Man’s Life Right Around”: Wallace’s Rehabilitation of Frederick Exley in IJ
Staiger, Jeff
This article demonstrates the ways in which Wallace draws upon Frederick Exley's autobiographical novel, A Fan's Notes, to create the character Don Gately, ultimately the hero of Wallace's magnum opus, Infinite Jest. In particular, it traces how Wallace fashions Gately to serve in the role of humane Everyman a la Joyce's Leopold Bloom, with the crucial complication that, just as Joyce based Bloom on an actual novelist, Italo Svevo, so Wallace, meticulously imitating Joyce's creative process, based Gately on Exley, recycling myriad details from Exley's now largely forgotten novel in order to establish its relevance to his own work. The special aptness of A Fan's Notes for Infinite Jest is that Exley's novel treats the same themes that are central to Wallace's novel -- addiction, sports, spectatorship, manhood, heroism -- but presents them with an individualistic, macho, cynical swagger that is precisely the attitude that Wallace identifies as a pervasive postmodern pathology that needs to be corrected. In rewriting Exley, Wallace performs a kind of textual therapy on his predecessor that reverses point for point the unregenerate cynicism flaunted by Exley, thereby proffering in the portrayal of Gately a more open and sincere, and more viable, approach to the rehabilitation of the self. On another, metafictional level, Wallace’s revision of revision as rehabilitation both affirms and revises the preeminent postmodern theory of literary revisionism, Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence.
36 pages
2020-01-01T00:00:00ZUnnatural Naturalism. Review of On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, Fiction by Brian Boyd
https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/handle/1794/17978
Unnatural Naturalism. Review of On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, Fiction by Brian Boyd
Staiger, Jeff
An extended review of On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, Fiction by Brian Boyd
2014-08-06T00:00:00ZJames Wood's Case Against 'Hysterical Realism' and Thomas Pynchon
https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/handle/1794/9680
James Wood's Case Against 'Hysterical Realism' and Thomas Pynchon
Staiger, Jeff
Postprint, from word file, 27 pp.
2008-01-01T00:00:00Z