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David Foster Wallace’s Mathematics of the Infinite

Taylor, Stuart J.

Authors



Contributors

Clare Hayes-Brady
Editor

Abstract

Thematically, formally and structurally, Wallace’s writing concerned itself with the infinite, from the antinomies of set theory and the obese Bombardini in The Broom of the System to the featureless horizon of Peoria in The Pale King, by way of the title of Infinite Jest and the brief and not wholly successful exploration of Cantorian mathematics in Everything and More, the idea of the infinite was never far from any of Wallace’s writing. Moreover, the structures of the writing continually reinscribe this obsession with infinity, with none of the novels conforming to a traditional boundaried structure and the collections of short fiction troubling the very concept of order in their use of pagination and enumeration. This chapter illuminates the importance of infinity to Wallace’s writing by exploring its formal and thematic development through his career, demonstrating that infinity worked as a conceptual counterpoint to solipsism, both an existential threat and a source of profound hope for the disassociated subject of contemporary culture.

Citation

Taylor, S. J. (2022). David Foster Wallace’s Mathematics of the Infinite. In C. Hayes-Brady (Ed.), David Foster Wallace in Context (169-180). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009064545.019

Online Publication Date Nov 18, 2022
Publication Date 2022
Deposit Date Feb 16, 2024
Publisher Cambridge University Press
Pages 169-180
Book Title David Foster Wallace in Context
Chapter Number 16
ISBN 9781316513323; 9781009073516
DOI https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009064545.019
Keywords mathematics, infinity, Georg Cantor, geometry, Sierpinski Gasket, fractal, transfinite, set theory, Everything and More, to apeiron, Eschaton
Public URL http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/3513687