NOVEL AFFIRMATIONS: DEFENDING LITERARY CULTURE IN THE FICTION OF DAVID FOSTER ...

215 Pages·2004·0.45 MB·English

NOVEL AFFIRMATIONS:
DEFENDING LITERARY CULTURE IN THE FICTION OF DAVID FOSTER
WALLACE, JONATHAN FRANZEN, AND RICHARD POWERS

A Dissertation
by
MICHAEL LITTLE

Submitted to the Office of Graduate Studies of
Texas A&M University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

May 2004

Major Subject: English
NOVEL AFFIRMATIONS:
DEFENDING LITERARY CULTURE IN THE FICTION OF DAVID FOSTER
WALLACE, JONATHAN FRANZEN, AND RICHARD POWERS

A Dissertation

by

MICHAEL LITTLE

Submitted to Texas A&M University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Approved as to style and content by:

David McWhirter Mary Ann O’Farrell
(Chair of Committee) (Member)

Sally Robinson Stephen Daniel
(Member) (Member)

Paul Parrish
(Head of Department)

May 2004

Major Subject: English
iii

ABSTRACT

Novel Affirmations: Defending Literary Culture in the Fiction of David Foster Wallace,
Jonathan Franzen, and Richard Powers. (May 2004)
Michael Little, B.A., University of Houston;
M.A., University of Houston
Chair of Advisory Committee: Dr. David McWhirter

This dissertation studies the fictional and non-fictional responses of David Foster
Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, and Richard Powers to their felt anxieties about the vitality
of literature in contemporary culture. The intangible nature of literature’s social value
marks the literary as an uneasy, contested, and defensive cultural site. At the same time,
the significance of any given cultural artifact or medium, such as television, film, radio,
or fiction, is in a continual state of flux. Within that broad context I examine some of the
cultural institutions competing with literature for public attention, as well as some of the
cultural developments impacting the availability of public attention for literary concerns.
With Wallace, I study his efforts in fiction and essays to establish an anti-ironic mode of
literary rebellion, in opposition to the culturally pervasive tone of self-protective irony
modeled by television. Franzen opens discussion about the transience of cultural
authority, a situation in which the imprimatur of the academy, for instance, confers a
cultural significance different in kind but not degree from the imprimatur of a popular
televised book club. My study of Franzen in particular demonstrates the impact of
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proliferating sites of cultural authority, addressing the emergence of middlebrow culture
and audiences from contested space to authoritative cultural arbiter. The chapter on
Franzen also examines the increasing role of corporate interests in the production of
cultural artifacts with an eye toward their financial viability more than their cultural
impact. And finally, my study of Powers focuses on the animosity between the sciences
and the humanities. Powers produces fiction that serves as an indispensable tool for
communicating between disparate and otherwise isolated disciplines, and for helping
those specialized fields synthesize their information with others.
v

DEDICATION

For Laine, Kyra, and Flynn, and for my mother, who knew before I ever started
that I would do this.
vi

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This dissertation is the result of years of work and support by a huge number of
people. Thanks first of all must go to my committee chair, David McWhirter, who
agreed to support this work even though it falls outside the scope of his primary field.
His wide-ranging knowledge, his critical readings of my work, and his professional
dedication have been valuable beyond calculation and will always be the standard
against which I measure my work and my bearing. Thanks also to committee member
Mary Ann O’Farrell, whose comments on my work were equally detailed, thoughtful,
and helpful, and, in one particular instance, well above and beyond what I could
reasonably have asked of her. Thanks as well to committee members Sally Robinson, for
agreeing to join the committee long after the project was underway, and to Stephen
Daniel, particularly for his engaged participation during my defense. Other faculty
members who have been morally, emotionally, and intellectually encouraging, as well as
just good friends, are Valerie Balester, Joanna Gibson, Jim Harner, Chris Holcomb,
Jimmie Killingsworth, and Jackie Palmer.
I also owe huge debts of gratitude and support to my friends who have led the
way and who have supported me and waited for me to catch up. Diana Ashe, Patricia
Brooke, Maria Papanikolaou, and Ellen Weber remind me regularly that I’ve
accomplished considerably more than I think I have and that I have proven myself
considerably more than I think I have. They have been my most dedicated boosters, and
my life is richer because of them. Les Harrison and Denise Grothues have always
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listened to my self-doubts and anxieties without ever failing to find the right perspective
to help me see my way out. Thanks to these and others who have read and commented
on my work, including Amy McWilliams, Tom Chapman, Jan Little, and Molly
McBride.
My co-workers have been supportive all along and I thank all of them for their
repeated words of encouragement. I owe thanks to my supervisors and employers for
their encouragement and also for their willingness to accommodate the varying and
flexible schedule I requested in order to finish: Joy Miller, Dr. Thomas Sturtevant, Mike
Wisby, Les Bunte, Sue Shahan, Dr. Arturo Alonzo, Bill May, and Lanny Smith have all,
one way or another, made sure that I had the time I needed to do this work. Special
thanks goes to Angela Thompson for bearing the brunt of my absence.
Thanks, awe, and love go at last to my family. To my wife Laine, whose firm and
unwavering support let me know always that I would finish, and as year led on to year
she alone saved me from thinking I might not be able to complete this work. To my
daughter Kyra, whose love, compassion, thoughtfulness, and intelligence are a never-
ending source of wonder, and to my daughter Flynn, whose smile and full-body laugh
are infectious and a regular reminder of what’s really important. Thanks also to my
brother, Matt, and to my father, who has made me remember that completing this work
is, in fact, the achievement I originally thought it was.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
ABSTRACT.............................................................................................................. iii
DEDICATION.......................................................................................................... v
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS...................................................................................... vi
TABLE OF CONTENTS.......................................................................................... viii
CHAPTER
I INTRODUCTION................................................................................... 1

II “YOU ARE LOVED”: DAVID FOSTER WALLACE’S RESPONSE
TO TELEVISUAL IRONY.................................................................... 21

Wallace’s Fictional Critiques of an Ironic Worldview.................. 28
Wallace on Television and Irony in Contemporary Mass
Culture............................................................................................ 39
The Exhaustion of Metafiction....................................................... 68
Infinite Jest and Radical Realism................................................... 83

III “ANOTHER 20 YEARS OF BORING LITERARY NOVELS AND THE
THING'S DEAD”: JONATHAN FRANZEN, OPRAH WINFREY, AND
THE INSTABILITY OF CULTURAL AUTHORITY.......................... 92

Oprah’s Book Club and Populist Cultural Authority..................... 97
The Corrections and Populist Cultural Authority.......................... 119

IV “IT’S ABOUT TEACHING A HUMAN TO TELL”: SCIENCE AND
THE HUMANITIES IN THE FICTION OF RICHARD POWERS...... 149

Powers and the Mutual Distrust of the Sciences and the
Humanities..................................................................................... 151
Consilience in Galatea 2.2............................................................. 167

V CONCLUSION....................................................................................... 194

WORKS CITED........................................................................................................ 196

VITA......................................................................................................................... 207
1
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION

This dissertation is a study of three contemporary novelists who have
demonstrated in their fiction and non-fiction a sharply felt anxiety about the cultural
status of literature, and who have argued in their fiction and non-fiction for the relevance
of literature in contemporary cultural life. I rely throughout on the critical work of my
primary authors and on secondary criticism that argues that literature maintains a
precarious cultural significance, and my interests here are two-fold: to explore some of
the cultural institutions and developments that compete with literature for public
attention, and to examine the fictional and non-fictional responses to those institutions
and developments in the works of David Foster Wallace, Richard Powers, and Jonathan
Franzen. My rationale for choosing these authors in particular derives from the fact that
each of them addresses the contemporary cultural status of the novel in essays,
interviews, and the fiction itself. Wallace, for example, takes the position that
television’s relentlessly ironic tone has become the tone of the culture at large,
essentially eliminating irony from the author’s rhetorical tool set. For fiction to pursue
an oppositional agenda effectively, Wallace suggests it must avoid the evasions of irony
and adopt a potentially “banal” tone of direct sincerity (“E Unibus Pluram” 81). For
Powers, one of the cultural threats to fiction comes from the tangible evidence of the

This dissertation follows the format of the MLA Handbook, Sixth Edition.
2
sciences’ contributions to knowledge and the resulting advances in quality of life; the
intangible contributions of the humanities suffer by comparison. Powers argues, in
interviews and in his fiction, for the value of fiction as a “moratorium” from life
(Neilson, “Interview” 22), a site of escape and reflection “where we can, at least
temporarily, take apart and refuse to compete within the terms that the rest of existence
insists on” (Neilson, “Interview” 23). I argue here that Powers also makes a case in his
fiction for the use of literature as a tool for sharing knowledge among diverse,
specialized disciplines. Franzen sits at the center of this dissertation for two reasons: one
is his explicit attention to the emergence of varied and competing claimants to cultural
authority; the other is his own indeterminate position, at times favoring elitist notions of
the purpose of fiction as a tool for social analysis and uncompromising aesthetics, while
at other times favoring populist models of fiction as a vehicle for entertainment. I discuss
him here in light of his expressed anxieties about the decline of white male cultural
authority and the power of corporate interests subsidizing cultural production to a degree
that threatens the author’s artistic integrity.
I chose to study Wallace, Franzen, and Powers in particular in large part because
they all began their writing careers well after the conditions that agitate their anxieties
had become manifest in contemporary culture. The state of culture in society, and the
role of literature within culture, have long been a concern of authors and critics to the
point that to understand literature is to understand it in part as a cultural space that
regularly seems compelled to justify itself. I chose to focus on specific threats to the
humanities present in contemporary culture and to concentrate on authors who, by the