David Foster Wallace: The Shaping Power of Education

David Foster Wallace (February 21, 1962 - September 12, 2008) was a highly influential American writer and professor. His educational background played a significant role in shaping his unique literary style and intellectual depth. This article explores the formative years and academic journey of Wallace, highlighting the key influences that contributed to his distinctive voice.

Early Life and Influences

Wallace grew up in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, a community dominated by the presence of the University of Illinois. His parents, James Wallace, a philosophy professor at the University of Illinois, and Sally (Foster) Wallace, an English teacher at Parkland College, instilled in him a love for learning and exposed him to a wide range of literature from an early age. His parents were avid readers who exposed Wallace and his sister, Amy, to such weighty opuses as Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) and James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) while they were young children. One of Wallace’s friends, Mark Costello, once said of his upbringing, “This was the kind of family where the mother would bring home the Encyclopædia Britannica for the family to read through.” This environment fostered intellectual curiosity and a deep appreciation for the written word.

Even as a teenager, Wallace demonstrated diverse talents. He was a talented tennis player as a youngster and ranked in the regional junior division. He wrote about this period in the essay "Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley", originally published in Harper's Magazine as "Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes".

Amherst College: A Foundation in Philosophy and Literature

Wallace attended Amherst College, his father's alma mater, where he double majored in English and philosophy. He received a B.A. from Amherst College in Massachusetts in 1985. At Amherst he served as managing editor of the college’s humor magazine. His studies in philosophy, particularly his focus on logic and mathematics, profoundly influenced his thinking and writing. His philosophy senior thesis on modal logic, titled Richard Taylor's 'Fatalism' and the Semantics of Physical Modality, was awarded the Gail Kennedy Memorial Prize.

Wallace adapted his honors thesis in English as the manuscript of his first novel, The Broom of the System (1987), and committed to being a writer. He told David Lipsky: "Writing The Broom of the System, I felt like I was using 97 percent of me, whereas philosophy was using 50 percent."

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University of Arizona: Mastering the Craft of Fiction

After graduating from Amherst, Wallace pursued a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing at the University of Arizona. He was completing a master’s degree in creative writing at the University of Arizona when his highly regarded debut novel, The Broom of the System (1987), was published. This experience allowed him to hone his skills as a fiction writer and develop his unique voice. However, infernal heat and social dislocation hit his Midwestern temperament hard. “It’s hot, here. Over 100 degrees and climbing,” Wallace wrote to a friend. “I have no job, no girlfriend, no friends.”

Harvard University: A Brief Foray into Advanced Philosophy

After earning a master’s degree in fine arts from the University of Arizona, Wallace briefly pursued graduate work in philosophy at Harvard University. However, he later abandoned those same studies.

Teaching Career: Shaping Future Writers

Wallace's passion for writing and literature led him to a career in teaching. In 1991, Wallace began teaching literature as an adjunct professor at Emerson College in Boston. The next year, at the suggestion of colleague and supporter Steven Moore, Wallace obtained a position in the English department at Illinois State University. Wallace began teaching writing at Illinois State University in Normal in 1993. In 2002 he was named the first Roy E. Disney professor of creative writing at Pomona College in Claremont. He later taught creative writing at Illinois State University and at Pomona College in California.

Key Works and Themes

Wallace's educational background deeply influenced his literary work. His novels, short stories, and essays often explore complex philosophical themes, incorporating his knowledge of logic, mathematics, and literary theory.

The Broom of the System

His debut novel, The Broom of the System (1987), which garnered national attention and critical praise, was adapted from his honors thesis at Amherst College. In The New York Times, Caryn James called it a "manic, human, flawed extravaganza." Readers come to realize that the central character’s search for her missing grandmother is actually a pursuit of her own identity. Wallace uses stylized wordplay to represent the notion that something’s value is nothing more or less than its function, a concept fostered by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s idea that language is a means by which reality is constructed.

Infinite Jest

Wallace became best known for his second novel, Infinite Jest (1996), a massive, multilayered novel that he wrote over the course of four years. In it appear a sweeping cast of postmodern characters that range from recovering alcoholics and foreign statesmen to residents of a halfway house and high-school tennis stars. Presenting a futuristic vision of a world in which advertising has become omnipresent and the populace is addicted to consumerism, Infinite Jest takes place during calendar years that have been named by companies that purchased the rights to promote their products. Infinite Jest was notably the first work of Wallace’s to feature what was to become his stylistic hallmark: the prominent use of notes (endnotes, in this case), which were Wallace’s attempt to reproduce the nonlinearity of human thought on the page. Critics, who found Wallace’s self-conscious, meandering writing style variously exhilarating and maddening, compared Infinite Jest to the novels of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo. A culture writer at The Guardian likened it to a “Gen-X Ulysses.”

His fiction combines narrative modes and authorial voices that incorporate jargon and invented vocabulary, such as self-generated abbreviations and acronyms, long, multi-clause sentences, and an extensive use of explanatory endnotes and footnotes, as in Infinite Jest and the story "Octet" (collected in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men), and most of his non-fiction after 1996.

Nonfiction Essays

Wallace's essay collections include A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (1997) and Consider the Lobster, and Other Essays (2005). He was also an acclaimed nonfiction writer, using his signature digressive, footnote-heavy prose to produce elaborate essays on such seemingly uncomplicated subjects as the Illinois state fair, talk radio, and luxury cruises.

Wallace's Style

Wallace wanted to progress beyond the irony and metafiction associated with postmodernism and explore a post-postmodern or metamodern style. Wallace's fiction is often concerned with irony. Wallace's novels often combine various writing modes or voices, and incorporate jargon and vocabulary (sometimes invented) from a wide variety of fields.

Wallace's writing featured self-generated abbreviations and acronyms, long multi-clause sentences, and a notable use of explanatory footnotes and endnotes - often nearly as expansive as the text proper. He used endnotes extensively in Infinite Jest and footnotes in Octet as well as the great majority of his nonfiction after 1996. On the Charlie Rose talk show in 1997, Wallace claimed that the notes were used to disrupt the linearity of the narrative, to reflect his perception of reality without jumbling the entire structure.

Awards and Recognition

He received a MacArthur Foundation fellowship grant in 1997. Wallace received the MacArthur Foundation "Genius Grant" in 1997. In 1997, Wallace was awarded the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction by editors of The Paris Review for one of the stories in Brief Interviews-"Brief Interviews with Hideous Men #6"-which had appeared in the magazine. He was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, and a Whiting Writers' Award, and was appointed to the Usage Panel for The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language.

Posthumous Works

Three years after Wallace’s death, another novel, The Pale King (2011), which the author had left unfinished, was released. The book was assembled by Michael Pietsch, who had long been Wallace’s editor. It is set in an Internal Revenue Service office in Peoria, Illinois, during the late 20th century. Most of its characters are examiners of annual income tax returns, and the book’s central theme is boredom-specifically, boredom as a potential means of attaining bliss and, as such, an alternative to the culture of overstimulation that is the main subject of Infinite Jest. A third collection of his nonfiction writing, Both Flesh and Not (2012), was also published posthumously.

Legacy

Wallace's unique blend of intellectual rigor, philosophical depth, and literary innovation has made him one of the most influential writers. His works continue to be studied and admired for their complexity, humor, and profound insights into the human condition.

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