Global Wallace

David Foster Wallace is almost always treated as a distinctly American writer. In this study, Lucas Thompson challenges that view. He argues that Wallace's engagement with a range of international literary traditions is central both to his artistic method and to his critique of US culture. Again and again, Wallace's fiction draws on global texts and borrows from forms of world literature, so that it can criticize American life from oblique and unexpected angles.

Thompson builds his case through comparative case studies and extensive archival research. He uncovers Wallace's considerable debts to writers who are rarely linked with him, among them Jamaica Kincaid, Julio Cortázar, Jean Rhys, Octavio Paz, Leo Tolstoy, Zbigniew Herbert and Albert Camus. The book also gives a fuller account of influences that Wallace scholars have already noticed, such as Fyodor Dostoevsky, Franz Kafka and Manuel Puig.

The analysis is organized around five broadly defined regions: Latin America, Russia, Eastern Europe, France and Africa. Reading Wallace's work through these territories shows how he set different literary traditions against one another and absorbed very different texts into his own writing. By widening the geographic frame in this way, the book recasts contemporary American fiction as part of a global exchange of texts and ideas.

It is written for graduate students and scholars of contemporary American fiction, David Foster Wallace, and world and comparative literature.