Beschreibung:
Much scholarship recognizes David Foster Wallace’s break with postmodern literature, particularly his identification of John Barth as a “patriarch for my patricide,” and his role establishing a new movement in writing, sometimes identified as “New Sincerity.” But part of Wallace’s new ethos included a return to modernist literature as a model for spirituality and ethics. This essay explores correspondences between Wallace and James Joyce. Across a variety of works, both authors present intellectually gifted but spiritually unmoored characters, balanced by characters who are less intellectually engaged, but more grounded thanks to a naïve, intuitive spirituality.