Books edited by Carissa Kampmeier
Collected works from the Third Annual David Foster Wallace Conference in Normal, Illinois, includ... more Collected works from the Third Annual David Foster Wallace Conference in Normal, Illinois, including nonfiction, fiction, poetry, criticism, original artwork, and hybrid work.
Collected works form the Second Annual David Foster Wallace Conference in Normal, Illinois, inclu... more Collected works form the Second Annual David Foster Wallace Conference in Normal, Illinois, including nonfiction, fiction, poetry, criticism, original artwork, and hybrid work.
Normal 2014: Collected Works from the First Annual DFW Conference, May 11, 2015
This essay couples David Foster Wallace’s works (Infinite Jest, This Is Water, and non-fiction es... more This essay couples David Foster Wallace’s works (Infinite Jest, This Is Water, and non-fiction essays) with contemporary research on shame and addiction and explores how literature anticipates science as a means of understanding the human condition. Wallace's personal knowledge of addiction and how the individual struggles with addiction’s causes and consequences reflects what social workers and M.D.s are beginning to understand as an issue of society at large, not simply an isolated problem of the addict. As much of the U.S. and other countries struggle with disconnection, isolation, and the overwhelming sense of hopelessness—manifested in burgeoning debt, obesity, medication dependence, etc.—we find ourselves confronted with the realization that the addict depicts our own inner turmoil that is
easily ignored or pacified in our materialistic, consumer-driven culture. Gabor Maté’s In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction (2011) and the work of Brené Brown, Ph.D., LMSW, present claims for how the individual is a reflection of the community and vice-versa, thereby arguing for a greater commitment to understanding and aiding those plagued by addiction. Wallace recognized, “Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else” (Infinite Jest 205). Yet his fiction and scholars’ research suggests that human beings share more identical attributes than dissimilar ones, and that the addict—whether it be Lenz, Hal, or even Gately as he struggles with sobriety—is not so different from the community who ostracizes him/her (Infinite Jest 205). Wallace, Maté, and Brown encourage authenticity, sincerity, and vulnerability, which are all traits that help addicts overcome their struggle with substances, and almost ironically, it is these traits that also push the literary community out of the post-modern refrain of disillusionment, deconstruction, and irony, which Wallace admittedly strove to overcome.
Papers by Carissa Kampmeier
As Brian McHale notes in Postmodernist Fiction, "There is no postmodernism 'out there' in the wor... more As Brian McHale notes in Postmodernist Fiction, "There is no postmodernism 'out there' in the world any more than there ever was a Renaissance or romanticism 'out there'" (4). Our understandings of postmodernism, like any period of literature, are merely constructions. Some constructions are more useful or inclusive than others. Jeremy Green characterizes these constructions as forming "a discursive field, a terrain of competing positions, rather than a coherent concept" (1). If postmodernism as a movement was hard to characterize, this was only one of the reasons. Perhaps more than any other period of literature, postmodernism foregrounded its constructedness, resulting in an upsurge of metatexts and language games that were expert at pointing to meaningmaking as a discursive process. It's not surprising that writers and critics are still having trouble identifying the thing we refer to as "postmodernism," which is well known for its resistance to limits and its deconstructive techniques. Green suggests that postmodernism is "a stylistic trend in art, architecture, and literature, typified by allusiveness, play, loose or arbitrary structures, fragmentation, willful superficiality, and the collision or commingling of high and low registers," even as he acknowledges that not all of these characteristics were new to the movement, nor does that description lead to anything like a "coherent model" (2).
Uploads
Books edited by Carissa Kampmeier
easily ignored or pacified in our materialistic, consumer-driven culture. Gabor Maté’s In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction (2011) and the work of Brené Brown, Ph.D., LMSW, present claims for how the individual is a reflection of the community and vice-versa, thereby arguing for a greater commitment to understanding and aiding those plagued by addiction. Wallace recognized, “Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else” (Infinite Jest 205). Yet his fiction and scholars’ research suggests that human beings share more identical attributes than dissimilar ones, and that the addict—whether it be Lenz, Hal, or even Gately as he struggles with sobriety—is not so different from the community who ostracizes him/her (Infinite Jest 205). Wallace, Maté, and Brown encourage authenticity, sincerity, and vulnerability, which are all traits that help addicts overcome their struggle with substances, and almost ironically, it is these traits that also push the literary community out of the post-modern refrain of disillusionment, deconstruction, and irony, which Wallace admittedly strove to overcome.
Papers by Carissa Kampmeier
easily ignored or pacified in our materialistic, consumer-driven culture. Gabor Maté’s In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction (2011) and the work of Brené Brown, Ph.D., LMSW, present claims for how the individual is a reflection of the community and vice-versa, thereby arguing for a greater commitment to understanding and aiding those plagued by addiction. Wallace recognized, “Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else” (Infinite Jest 205). Yet his fiction and scholars’ research suggests that human beings share more identical attributes than dissimilar ones, and that the addict—whether it be Lenz, Hal, or even Gately as he struggles with sobriety—is not so different from the community who ostracizes him/her (Infinite Jest 205). Wallace, Maté, and Brown encourage authenticity, sincerity, and vulnerability, which are all traits that help addicts overcome their struggle with substances, and almost ironically, it is these traits that also push the literary community out of the post-modern refrain of disillusionment, deconstruction, and irony, which Wallace admittedly strove to overcome.