The bodies in the bubble: David Foster Wallace's<i>The Pale King</i>

Godden, Richard; Szalay, Michael

doi:10.1080/0950236x.2014.965472

Cited by 13 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…As both the early and late Marx insisted, there is a 'commodity language', which is 'the language our possessions use together' (Marx 1975 276; see also Marx 1991: 143-4;Hamacher 2008;Derrida 1994: 157-8). This 'language', the language of value, is a 'language' that is inextricably bound to the 'material' (Godden and Szalay 2014). In this case, as Werner Hamacher (2008) suggested, 'language' speaks not only for the commodity but also potentially in excess of this value of exchange.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Utopias of the Text: Pre-Figurations of the Post-Literary

Noys

2019

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Utopias of the text are the moments of the emergence of a new and radical concept of the text as overflowing all limits and boundaries. Here these utopias are traced in the writings of Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault. They often emerge at the margins of these texts, in fragments or boundaries at which the utopia can be glimpsed before disappearing. These utopian moments can be reconstructed as a form of thinking the post-literary and its limits. They can also be traced to the explosion of speech during May 1968 and Maurice Blanchot is a key figure who links together this political moment with the ‘neutral’ form of writing. This article explores the fading of these utopias of the text alongside this draining of political energies. These processes of critique and waning suggest the inversion of utopias of the text into dystopias of the text. Now the sign or signifier appears dispersed or even insignificant compared to the powers and forces of post-literary domination. In this situation, however, the article suggests, the persistence of the utopias of the text as a critical horizon that can still inform how we grasp the equivocations of our post-literary moment.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Utopias of the Text: Pre-Figurations of the Post-Literary

Noys

2019

CounterText

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“… 2 2 For discussions on neoliberalism in The Pale King , see Boswell (2012), Shapiro (2014), Dorson (2014), Moran (2017), and Richard Godden and Michael Szalay (2014). …”

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confidence: 99%

Leaving class behind?

Lee

2022

Orbis Litterarum

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David Foster Wallace’s novel The Pale King (2011) presents a social mobility narrative marked by the conflicting support for and challenge against the neoliberal ideology of meritocratic individualism. In the Toni Ware sections of the novel, the portrait of the working class is dominated by a solitary genius protagonist. Toni’s escape from poverty relies on both contingent circumstance and personal merit. Even though Toni subverts the myth of the classless society that grounds the middle‐class ideology of consumer capitalism, the way she does so embodies the rugged individualism that underlies precisely this ideology. Interrogating these ambiguities, this essay argues that Wallace’s social mobility narrative of the Toni Ware sections, while going some way toward resisting meritocracy and individualism, also supports these neoliberal middle‐class ideological discourses by making its upwardly mobile protagonist a solitary genius. Moreover, by showing the adult Toni’s rebellion against the myth of the classless society to be an outsider renegade’s descent into sociopathic villainy, the story affirms her subversion yet problematizes individualistic rebellion.

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“The office could be any office”: Toward a New Sincerity in the Age of Trumpism

Steinhilber

2022

American Literature Readings in the 21st Century

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The bodies in the bubble: David Foster Wallace'sThe Pale King

Cited by 13 publications

References 6 publications

Utopias of the Text: Pre-Figurations of the Post-Literary

Utopias of the Text: Pre-Figurations of the Post-Literary

Leaving class behind?

“The office could be any office”: Toward a New Sincerity in the Age of Trumpism

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