This paper examines David Foster Wallace’s earliest story: “The Planet Trillaphon as It Stands in Relation to the Bad Thing,” in search of the deceptively autobiographical elements of it that condition the experience of the reader. It will be argued that the life-narrative of authors inadvertently imposes on their reception an affective response, and one that is deeply conditioned by the knowledge of it that readers may have. Approaching Wallace from a post-authorialist perspective, this piece attempts to dilucidate what manner of significance academia should be expected to attribute to writers in late postmodernism, where the author, now long dead, has become not only a market force, but also a much fabricated, guiding superstructure which might discursively restrain the imaginative possibilities of reconstruction at the reader’s disposal.
© 2001-2024 Fundación Dialnet · Todos los derechos reservados