David Foster Wallace

In <i>David Foster Wallace: Fiction and Form</i> David Hering analyses the structures of David Foster Wallace's fiction from his debut <i>The Broom of the System</i>to his final unfinished novel <i>The Pale King</i>. Incorporating extensive analysis of Wallace's drafts notes and letters and taking account of the rapidly expanding field of Wallace scholarship this book argues that the form of Wallace's fiction is always inextricably bound up within an ongoing conflict between the monologic and the dialogic one strongly connected with Wallace's sense of his own authorial presence and identity in the work. <br/> <br/>Hering suggests that this conflict occurs at the level of both subject and composition analysing the importance of a number of provocative structural and critical contexts - ghostliness institutionality reflection - to the fiction while describing how this argument is also visible within the development of Wallace's manuscripts comparing early drafts with published material to offer a career-long framework of the construction of Wallace's fiction. The final chapter offers an unprecedentedly detailed analysis of the troubled decade-long construction of the work that became <i>The Pale King</i>.