Freedom-from versus Freedom-to: A Dialectical Reading of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest

Abstract

Abstract This essay submits David Foster Wallace’s major work Infinite Jest, famous for its vehement critique of postmodern culture, to a thoroughly dialectical method of analysis. In contrast to many previous studies of Wallace’s novel, a dialectical approach conceives of postmodernism not as a ‘style’ of writing available among others to an individual author like Wallace but as a socio-cultural dominant to which the text is indissolubly and actively connected. The essay attempts such a ‘totalizing’ reading of Infinite Jest and an assessment of the text’s difference from postmodernism by moving through two distinct horizons of historicizing interpretation. First, the analysis aims to demonstrate that on the level of content the text is governed by a semantic opposition between freedom and value that can be read in terms of the novel’s structuring ideological system. Second, on the level of form, Infinite Jest is analyzed in terms of a formal conflict between postmodern spatiality and a latent utopian impulse mediated by the novel’s incorporation of science fiction elements.