In the article, Franzen argued that literary fiction is a dying art. Thus, the main characteristic that defines this group of brilliant authors is their need to free themselves from the baggage dropped by all previous writers.”įranzen’s 1996 article, “Perchance to Dream: In an Age of Images, a Reason to Write Novels,” in Harper’s was a virtual call to arms for the YWG. This group of authors was educated in the late ‘70s and ’80s by English departments and creative writing programs in which narrative deconstruction and paranoid irony was the rage.” 5 “This postmodern synthetic brew of education left each of these young men uncertain about how to make their own way against the tide. ‘Your Honor, I’d like to enter the ENTIRE Franzen/Oprah book club debacle as evidence number 3253 as to why the YWGs really are out to turn the world upside down.’ The group included: DFW, Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen, Donald Antrim, Rick Moody, and Dave Eggers are the writers generally accepted as comprising the YWG. The group was “The Young White Guys.” Soon after the article, “The New Fab Four,” was published, the name caught on around the industry. But this Infinite Jest Summary Guide may actually prove valuable to you – at least, that is the hope! The Young White GuysĪs a preface, I first come across David Foster Wallace and his writing through my discovery of a group of young writers that was intent on turning the literary world upside down. It’s long and thick, and when you couple that with the density of the prose and the complexity of how DFW thinks, it makes for a fairly intense going to just read the book, let alone to review it.

Part of the complexity of doing an Infinite Jest review is just how long this book is 4. And so this will be my attempt to do the greatest author of all time justice with a fan review 3. I have done a number of DFW reviews including a number of attempts at fully reviewing Infinite Jest – but all of them have been shells of reviews… husks what they should have been. If you don’t yet have the book Infinite Jest yet, get it right here in order to help keep THiNC going. So this Infinite Jest Summary Guide will be an attempt to create An Explanation of David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest”… which, if truth be told, is doomed to fail even before it begins, but I’d rather fail attempting a David Foster Wallace 2 review than succeed with anyone else 1. 20 – (See what I did there? I know… clever, huh?.

Infinite jest cliff notes