Episode 21 - Discussing David Foster Wallace with Clare Hayes-Brady

 

In this episode we talk with Wallace scholar Clare Hayes-Brady about her new book The Unspeakable Failures of David Foster Wallace.

http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/the-unspeakable-failures-of-david-foster-wallace-9781501313530/

She is Lecturer in American Literature at University College, Dublin.

We discuss a variety of issues in this episode including bad endings, DFW Studies, Ricoeur, love, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and assorted other things.

You can find her on Twitter https://twitter.com/ClareHayesBrady

  

Show notes

00:30 - Byzantine Erotica right off the bat

01:30 - Spelling of Quebecois

02:30 - UCD vs TCD

04:01 - The Unspeakable Failures

05:01 - Noncompletion, the lack of closure

05:45 - A Failed Entertainment

08:30 - Short Story Theory, resistance to closure

10:39 - We don’t have neat narratives

13:00 - How can you be done with something?

14:26 - Starting IJ again

15:20 - The peripheral stuff

16:27 - Was IJ/DFW narcissistic?

19:10 - The empathetic connection with readers

20:38 - Incoherent need to communicate

22:21 - The problem with romantic relationships--and Anne Geddes

25:21 - Misogyny from a place of fear

26:36 - The Granola Cruncher

30:53 - The silencing of female characters

31:02 - The Lionel Shriver issue

35:18 - A poorly disguised avatar

35:45 - Hungerford piece

37:02 - The Joycean Boys Club

39:59 - The C-word

44:42 - Inhabiting other minds

45:29 - Hurston not explaining things

47:26 - White male protagonists. . . groan

48:46 - VIDA count and the equivalent awareness

50:01 - Separating the artist from the art

51:29 - Ferrante & Knausgaard

55:36 - Writing beyond his own perspective

56:20 - Hardcore Theory Weenies

58:41 - Conflating a couple of paradoxes

59:59 - A fascinating disaster of a book

1:01:54 - The conclusions of the failures

1:04:40 - First attempt in Learning

1:05:08 - Post on Poor Yorick’s Summer

1:05:30 - Honest Ulsterman and motherhood

1:08:40 - Easter Egg