David Foster Wallace and the Vertigo of Notation: Transformations of Description in Contemporary Fiction

Abstract

This essay starts with the consideration of a significant tension between thematic constantly asserted by the writer David Foster Wallace throughout his fictions and essays and his usage of certain narrative procedures that ultimately lead back to the dead ends of the Flaubertian free indirect discourse, as discussed by Moretti. Through a contrastive reading between Moretti’s and Rancière’s analyses of the social changes that are given expression through Flaubert’s narrative form, this work explores the hypothesis that Wallace seeks to transmit through his fiction a kind of learning of attention – which forms the basis of Realist prose – that ultimately goes against the very transformations undergone by narrative technique in the course of the historical process.