Remembering David Foster Wallace
Wonder Cabinet
Wonder Cabinet Productions
4.8 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 7 August 2015
⏱️ 52 minutes
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Summary
David Foster Wallace changed the landscape of American writing. His novels dissect our media-saturated culture in unflinching detail. And his essays are passed around to friends with the words, “You have to read this.” He became a literary rock star in his early thirties for his sprawling novel “Infinite Jest,” which introduced the world to his looping, verbose, cerebral style. And now, there’s a new Hollywood movie about David Foster Wallace, starring Jason Segel and Jesse Eisenberg. Today, we celebrate the life and work of David Foster Wallace. How To Live Authentically In An Inauthentic World: Laura Miller on David Foster Wallace; David Foster Wallace Discusses Infinite Jest; The Cult of DFW: How David Foster Wallace Became A Literary Icon; "Life Can Become This Incredibly Funny, Sharp, Alive Thing" - David Lipsky Remembers David Foster Wallace; David Foster Wallace: Our Last Interview ; "He Made You Love The Way Americans Talk" - Lev Grossman Reflects on David Foster Wallace; A Supposedly Fun Thing: Hear David Foster Wallace Deliver An Anti-Cruise Diatribe; "I Can Still Hear His Voice" - Amy Wallace-Havens Remembers Her Brother, David Foster Wallace; David Foster Wallace's Famous Commencement Address, "This is Water".
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Support for WPR comes from St. Luke's Burthing Center, providing expectant mom's low intervention options, with labor tubs, remote telemetry, and nitrous oxide. |
| 0:10.3 | More information is at slh Duluth.com slash baby. |
| 0:18.9 | It's to the best of our knowledge from PRI. I'm Anne Strange Champs, and today we're |
| 0:23.7 | remembering an American literary genius. Please welcome David Foster Wallace. He was a literary rock |
| 0:31.1 | star during his lifetime, a literary legend after his suicide in 2008. And now David Foster |
| 0:37.3 | Wallace is the subject of a new Hollywood |
| 0:39.3 | movie. But this hour, we'll meet him in his own words. I don't know if you guys suffer |
| 0:45.3 | from this phenomenon. When I can tell that the person on stage is nervous, I get nervous for him. |
| 0:49.9 | It's a horrible feeling. And I will be really nervous for the first two or three minutes, |
| 0:56.6 | but don't fret because the minute I forget about myself |
| 0:59.5 | and get interested in what I'm doing, it goes away. |
| 1:01.7 | So I just wanted to let you know we'll all be fine. |
| 1:05.0 | The excerpt that I'm going to read is from a long story that's set in a... |
| 1:08.0 | That is so typical of David Foster Wallace in person and in his writing, that acutely |
| 1:13.7 | observant mind, the almost painful self-awareness and the humor and the charm. |
| 1:19.7 | He was a dazzling writer. People teach entire college courses on his novel, Infinite Gest. His |
| 1:26.0 | nonfiction essays are so sharp and so funny, |
| 1:29.0 | one inspired a Simpsons episode. And at this point, you may be wondering, okay, what did he |
| 1:34.3 | actually write about? My name is Laura Miller, and I am the book critic for salon.com. |
| 1:41.2 | David Foster Wallace was the most important writer of his time because he tried harder than anybody else really to figure out what it meant to live in a world where we are so conscious of how we appear to other people that we almost lose the ability to be ourselves. |
| 2:03.6 | That was really the central theme of his work, this quest for some kind of authenticity of the self. |
| 2:10.3 | And one of the hardest things for contemporary fiction writers to do is write in a meaningful way about living in a society that's completely saturated |
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