Hering, David. David Foster Wallace: Fiction and Form

David Hering’s David Foster Wallace: Fiction and Form begins with an original thesis: all of Wallace’s fiction oscillates between monologism and dialogism in a process revolving around “the continual risk of a master discourse engendered by the degree of Wallace’s authorial presence” (7). The thesis shakes one of the fundamental anchors of Wallace criticism, i.e. the reading of Wallace as a “new Dostoevsky” whose fiction provides a dialogic context for the staging of opposite abstract ideas. Also, it introduces the main focus of this monograph, namely the formal analysis of Wallace’s fiction, one that does not do without content, intentionality, nor non-fiction.