D. F. Wallace’s ‘E unibus pluram: television and U.S. Fiction’ as a key to the understanding of American culture and society: an analysis of main themes in the context of ‘Infinite jest’(1996) and ‘The pale king’ (2011) novels

The article analyzes the main ideas of the essay E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction (1993) written by the American writer David Foster Wallace (1962-2008). According to scholars and researchers studying the writer’s oeuvre, this essay reflects his worldview and serves as the basis of most of his literary works. In E Unibus Pluram, D. F. Wallace considered the following issues as characterizing modern American culture and society: addictions of American people caused by their loneliness and dissatisfaction with life; consumerism as an unproductive activity; individualism as the embodiment of selfishness and unwillingness to pursue communal well-being; the contradictory nature of freedom and the illusion of choice. In addition, D. F. Wallace examined cynicism and irony of postmodernism cultivated by commercial art that, in turn, distort American writers’ perception of reality: they are basing their works on the fiction presented by television, which they perceive as realistic material. The researchers believe that the analyzed essay largely marked the transition from American postmodernism to metamodernism (the concepts such as ‘New Sincerity’ ‘postirony’, etc. are also used as related or synonymous) in the 20th-21st centuries; Wallace’s statement about the exhaustion of postmodern irony and his call for sincerity are considered to lie at the heart of reflections on the place of the writer in the modern literary context. The issues stated above are discussed in the article in the context of the D. F. Wallace’s magnum opus Infinite Jest (1996) and his unfinished novel The Pale King (2011): it is concluded that they are central to understanding these novels and reveal meanings and ideas conveyed in the texts. This is the novelty of this article: there have been numerous research papers about the personality and works of the author published abroad; however, in Russian literary criticism, these aspects are insufficiently studied or have not been considered yet.