Since its inception, David Foster Wallace studies has focused on a relatively small set of themes-irony, sincerity, addiction, and the mass media-often centered on Wallace's own descriptions of his literary project in interviews and essays. Severs's insightful new study builds on and challenges this critical orthodoxy, revealing how Wallace was a careful economic, political, and historical thinker. Wallace's writing, as Severs shows in a series of original and bracing chapters that cover the author's whole career, engaged provocatively with the New Deal, the social-welfare state, the monetary system, and the history of neoliberalism. Severs uncovers a new domain of questions that will dominate debates about Wallace's legacy and the meaning of his important art for decades to come.
Lee Konstantinou, author of Cool Characters: Irony and American Fiction From this study, David Foster Wallace emerges as a 'rebellious economic thinker,' as well as a literary innovator and cultural critic. Severs has mastered Wallace's fiction and examines it through neoliberal policies to show seams of value-moral and economic-running throughout. Attentive to history and language, Severs demonstrates how Wallace represents work as a form of grace, weight as a means of uplift, and balance as an elusive aim.
Heather Houser, author of Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect Jeffrey Severs has an archivist's nose for the 'good stuff' from David Foster Wallace's papers at the Ransom Center; he has an eagle eye for motifs that circulate from one Wallace book to another; and he is uncannily skillful in making apposite connections between Wallace and his precursors, contemporaries, and successors. Only someone as widely and deeply read in late-twentieth and early-twenty-first century literature as Severs could have pulled this off.
Brian McHale, Distinguished Arts and Humanities Professor, Ohio State University