Judd Staley

The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Distribution & The American Novel at the End of the Millennium

My paper explores the use of film as a medium for history in two “big novels” of the late 1990s: Don DeLillo’s Underworld and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Published at roughly the same time, they share a similar project: examining America, and through America “modern humanity,” at the end of the twentieth century. They approach this project from opposite directions, however: DeLillo projects his story backwards, tracing the development of his particular late century moment through the latter half of the century, while Wallace projects forward, into the future and the next century. I will argue that the projection of history is central to the ideas of these two texts, whether facing backwards into the past or forwards into the future. I will discuss how the projection of history is tied in the novels to the physical means of projection and information distribution, especially (but not exclusively) film. I will also address the books’ argument that recent American history involves the projection of “the Other,” and how they present the end of the Cold War as a vacuum in this project of projection. My argument will draw on the ideas of Walter Benjamin in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” to explore the significance of film as a symbol of modernity in the two novels, and will also explore their use of poststructuralist, post-Lacanian theory in their fictional projects. I will conclude with a comparison of the novels in terms of the project of writing “after postmodernism.”

Judd Staley is from the Albany-area of upstate New York. If he were a character in Infinite Jest, he would probably be portrayed as someone addicted to red wine and prescription painkillers as a way of filling the void left by his frustration at failing to realize his dream of someday being a rock star. But that’s not really what he’s like, in real life, at all.