---
layout: post
status: publish
published: true
title: ! 'Conference Paper: Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace and Twenty-First-Century
  Utopianism, 16-18 July, 2012, University of Lincoln'

wordpress_id: 1910
wordpress_url: https://www.martineve.com/?p=1910
date: !binary |-
  MjAxMi0wMi0xMCAxNDo1MDoyMiArMDEwMA==
date_gmt: !binary |-
  MjAxMi0wMi0xMCAxNDo1MDoyMiArMDEwMA==
categories:
- Literature
- Thomas Pynchon
- Conferences
- David Foster Wallace
- Academia
- Output
- Conference Papers
tags:
- Conference
- Thomas Pynchon
- David Foster Wallace
- utopia
comments: []
---
<p>I am pleased to announce that I will be speaking at the "<a href="http://www.lincoln.ac.uk/home/campuslife/whatson/eventsconferences/event%20name,8029,en.html">What Happens Now</a>" conference at the University of Lincoln on twenty-first century fiction.</p>
<p><img src="https://www.martineve.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/DFW_Larger.jpg" alt="David Foster Wallace" title="David Foster Wallace" style="width:750px;" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-1913" /></p>
<p>By the publication of <i>Infinite Jest</i> in 1996, it had long been David Foster Wallace's [1962-2008] ambition to move beyond the now “critical and destructive” postmodern irony that he claimed introduced “sarcasm, cynicism, a manic ennui, suspicion of all authority, suspicion of all constraints on conduct” into literature and culture. With the posthumous publication of <i>The Pale King</i> [2011], scholars can now begin to appraise Wallace's twenty-first-century writing against that ambition.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, a cursory glance at the twenty-first-century fiction of Thomas Pynchon [1937-], the most frequently-named influence upon Wallace, appears to reveal a similar shift. Both <i>Against the Day</i> [2006] and <i>Inherent Vice</i> [2010] seem to alternate between a playfulness and a mode that abandons many of the metafictive devices and tropes of indeterminacy exemplified in <i>V.</i> [1963], <i>The Crying of Lot 49</i> [1966] and <i>Gravity's Rainbow</i> [1973], for which Pynchon is now typecast as the godfather of American postmodernity.</p>
<p>In this paper I will train a harsh critical gaze upon an emergent strain of post-postmodernism that purports to rethink these issues: “metamodernism”. Simultaneously, I will amalgamate Walllace's and Pynchon's often assumed, but never fully formulated, points of convergence while disturbing the concept of a millennial turning point for a revived, ethically-viable fiction. While Wallace worked to demonstrate “that cynicism and naievety are mutually compatible” (Boswell 2003) – an aim accurately described by “metamodernism” – much of Pynchon's fiction can also be so described; it appears that metamodernism's Vice could be Inherent within postmodern literature. Indeed, although it is accurate to describe both of these writers as metamodern, as a form of post-postmodernism, metamodernism cannot be used as a temporal specifier, but rather as an identifier of important shared thematic attributes; those aspects that point toward a regulative utopianism.</p>
<p><i>Featured image by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ari/">Steve Rhodes</a> under a CC-BY license.</i></p>