Geologies of Finitude: The Deep Time of Twenty-First-Century Catastrophe in Don DeLillo’s Point Omegaand Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia

The twenty-first century has seen a transformation of twentieth-century narrative and historical discourse. On the one hand, the Cold War national fantasy of mutually assured destruction has multiplied, producing a diverse array of apocalyptic visions. On the other, there has been an increasing sobriety about human finitude, especially considered in the light of emerging discussions about deep time. This essay argues that Don DeLillo’s Point Omega (2010) and Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (2008) make strong cases for the novel’s continuing ability to complicate and illuminate contemporaneity. Written in the midst of the long and disastrous U.S. incursions in the Middle East, DeLillo and Negarestani raise important political questions about the ecological realities of the War on Terror. Each novel acknowledges that though the catastrophic present cannot be divorced from the inevitable doom at the end of the world, we still desperately need to imagine something else

“Then Out of the Rubble”: The Apocalypse in David Foster Wallace’s Early Fiction

Excerpt from first paragraph: In the emerging field of David Foster Wallace studies, nothing has been more widely cited in terms of understanding Wallace’s literary project than two texts that appeared in the 1993 issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction. “E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction” and a lengthy interview with Larry McCaffery have been significant landmarks for critics of his work in much the same way that T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” or Henry James’s “The Art of Fiction” were for critics of those writers. Following Wallace’s argument in “E Unibus Pluram,” that the “postmodern irony” of such writers like Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo had infected United States culture at all levels, and especially the medium of television, much of the conversation regarding his fiction has revolved around irony and his sense of being a latecomer in relation to his postmodern forebears. Criticism approaching his work through the lens of “E Unibus Pluram” has been so prevalent that, one might be permitted to suggest, a “standard” reading of his fiction has emerged. Much of this criticism has been quite impressive, and the recent groundswell of work being done on Wallace since his untimely death in 2008 is in the process of forging new paths for understanding his contribution to American letters

An Interview with Jonathan Arac

This interview with literary critic Jonathan Arac was conducted at the University of Pittsburgh on May 19, 2015. Arac, a member of the boundary 2 editorial collective since 1979, speaks at length about his life and work. Addressing the impact of theory on his career, he discusses how he came to be associated with the New Americanists, his project of a new literary history, the changes in his own writing, and his involvement with the journal boundary 2. Arac also reflects on his teaching and his directorship of the Humanities Center at the University of Pittsburgh. The interview concludes with a conversation about the 1930s and the period's continuing relevance for the twenty-first century, Arac's recent project on the “Age of the Novel,” and the transformations in the field since he first began teaching

Isn’t It a Beautiful Day? An Interview with J. Hillis Miller

This interview with esteemed literary critic J. Hillis Miller was conducted via Skype on July 17, 2013. Miller speaks about a number of issues important to his life and work. Providing a number of emblematic parables, Miller discusses his early career, his work on the poetry of William Carlos Williams, and his famous essay “The Critic as Host.” He then addresses the reception of his criticism, his thoughts on irony and the work of Paul de Man, the current state of the humanities and humanities education, and the impact of digital technologies on contemporary reading practices. The interview concludes with a discussion of PRISM and the continuing importance of reading and studying literature

The Inverted Nuke in the Garden: Archival Emergence and Anti-Eschatology in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest

This essay historically situates David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest as a transitional text between the first and second nuclear ages. Written in the immediate wake of the Cold War, Infinite Jest complexly develops the nuclear trope’s fabulously textual persistence despite the relative disappearance of the discourse of Mutually Assured Destruction. Through recursively inverting what he called postmodern metafiction’s “Armageddon-explosion,” I argue that Wallace attempts to articulate an anti-eschatological imagination capable of attending to the second nuclear age. Paying particular attention to his projection of US “Experialism” and the nuclear simulation Eschaton, I analyze Wallace’s construction of the Entertainment as the emergence of the nuclear, not as an “event,” a moment where the bomb explodes, a moment of destruction and indetermination, but rather as a result of archival accumulation and network assemblage, of the materiality of text becoming catastrophic. If the American eschatological imagination continues to project fantasies of annihilation, Wallace quite presciently warns us throughout Infinite Jest that even without the “presence” of the nuclear bomb, or indeed even without the teleological end to America’s Cold War narrative, we should be wary of disaster remaining a dominant form of cultural representation

Consider David Foster Wallace: Critical Essays edited by David Hering

Review of Consider David Foster Wallace

Metaproceduralism: The Stanley Parable and the Legacies of Postmodern Metafiction

Most critics of contemporary literature have reached a consensus that what was once called “postmodernism” is over and that its signature modes—metafiction and irony—are on the wane. This is not the case, however, with videogames. In recent years, a number of self-reflexive games have appeared, exemplified by Davey Wreden’s The Stanley Parable (2013), an ironic game about games. When self-awareness migrates form print to screen, however, something happens. If metafiction can be characterized by how it draws attention to its materiality—the artificiality of language and the construction involved in acts of representation—The Stanley Parable draws attention to the digital, procedural materiality of videogames. Following the work of Alexander R. Galloway and Ian Bogost, I argue that the self-reflexivity of The Stanley Parable is best understood in terms of action and procedure, as metaproceduralism. This essay explores the legacies of United States metafiction in videogames, suggesting that though postmodernism might be over, its lessons are important to remember for confronting the complex digital realities of the twenty-first century. If irony may be ebbing in fiction, it has found a vital and necessary home in videogames and we underestimate its power to challenge the informatic, algorithmic logic of cultural production in the digital age to our detriment

Introduction to Twenty-First-Century Forms and Hyperarchival Poetics

Drawing upon theories of the long poem in the United States and his other work on massive twenty-first-century forms, Bradley J. Fest’s paper will sketch a theory of hyperarchival poetics and suggest how we might understand contemporary poiesis as positioned between the new forms of textual hyperaccumulation and of textual destruction that have arisen in the digital age. He also introduces session 197. Twenty-First-Century Forms

The Apocalypse Archive: American Literature and the Nuclear Bomb

This dissertation looks at global nuclear war as a trope that can be traced throughout twentieth century American literature. I argue that despite the non-event of nuclear exchange during the Cold War, the nuclear referent continues to shape American literary expression. Since the early 1990s the nuclear referent has dispersed into a multiplicity of disaster scenarios, producing a “second nuclear age.” If the atomic bomb once introduced the hypothesis “of a total and remainderless destruction of the archive,” today literature’s staged anticipation of catastrophe has become inseparable from the realities of global risk. Consequently, to understand the relationship between the archive of twentieth and twenty-first century disaster literature and the world risk society, my dissertation revitalizes nuclear criticism by emphasizing the link between the development of nuclear weaponry and communication technologies. I read a group of writers for whom nuclear war functions more as a structural principle than as a narrative event. William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All (1923) is a significant precursor of a nuclear imagination distinct from a more general apocalyptic imagination. By imagining the destruction and reappearance of terrestrial life, Williams’s poem captures the recursive character of the nuclear imagination. I then address the relationship between the nuclear imagination, narrative, and the writing of history in the novels of Thomas Pynchon, and how his asymptotic engagement with nuclear war attempts to transform postmodernity’s sense of an ending. David Foster Wallace’s subsequent response in Infinite Jest (1996) to US metafiction’s apocalyptic atmosphere is transitional between the first and second nuclear ages, reconfiguring the archive from a target of destruction into a system capable of producing emergent disaster through accumulation. My dissertation thus draws together technologies of destruction and preservation, and shows them to be inseparable in twentieth and twenty-first century US literature