David Foster Wallace 初期作品における後期ポストモダン文学批判と他者の探求

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タイトル別名
  • Criticism Against Late Postmodern Literature and Exploration of the Other in David Foster Wallace’s Early Works
  • David Foster Wallace　ショキ　サクヒン　ニ　オケル　コウキ　ポストモダン　ブンガク　ヒハン　ト　タシャ　ノ　タンキュウ

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説明

This paper examines the exploration of the Other in David Foster Wallace’s early works by following his criticism against 1980s postmodern literature. Through his critical analysis of the relation between TV culture and literature in the 1980s, the paper argues that the recursive loop of metafiction and irony eventually prevents the development of literary form and structure after early postmodernists such as Thomas Pynchon and John Barth. Moreover, by reading Wallace’s essay “E Unibus Pluram: TV and U.S. Culture” focusing on novels written by young novelists who are deeply influenced by irony inherent in TV culture, the paper illustrates his idea that those novels often recognize a fictional world constructed in TV as a reality. In the first section, this paper points out that selfconscious irony and metafiction encompass novels of the 1980s. Next, this article compares Wallace’s view on late postmodern literature with Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, and examines their difference in postmodern culture in relation to late capitalism. While Jameson affirms cultural expansion in the social realm, Wallace considers that literature is under the control of capitalism and industrialization. In these arguments, I prove that the problems of literary technique and capitalism interrupt the development of literature. After examining Wallace’s criticism to late postmodern literature, this paper explores the Other in his context through construing his novella “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way,” which directly responds to one of the most famous postmodern stories, “Lost in the Funhouse” written by John Barth. The novella aims to debunk metafictional recursivity by pretending to write metafiction, but the strategy fails as Wallace himself approves of its failure. Despite its failure, the paper hypothesizes that the Other is possibly a key to success to escape from the recursive loop of metafiction. The figure of the Other in Wallace’s context is theorized by Adam Kelly’s article “David Foster Wallace and New Sincerity in American Fiction.” In the article, Kelly presumes that the text’s true other is the reader, and explains how the fiction of New Sincerity is conditioned by a writer’s attitude to tell his/her novel to readers sincerely. In conclusion, this paper demonstrates that Wallace requires the Other to escape from postmodern self-consciousness in the early stage of his career.

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