Tout en rendant hommage à Franz Kaltenbeck et à ses analyses psychanalytiques de l’œuvre de l’écrivain américain David Foster Wallace, regroupées dans son ouvrage L’écriture mélancolique (2020), cet article apporte un éclairage légèrement différent à la fiction mélancolique de Wallace en insistant sur ses traits stylistiques et narratifs, sa relation au lecteur et ses vertus paradoxalement thérapeutiques.
This paper examines D.F. Wallace’s Infinite Jest as “the scroll fragments of a distant future” (Don De Lillo) mirroring the mental mutations of contemporary America and including endless party, ‘fancy sardonic exhaustion’, uprootedness, death of the symbolic order, totalitarianism, depression and drug addiction. It captures the way Wallace resists seduction and hostility to his reader by restoring a human relation through empathy and laughter.
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