Union College Union | Digital Works Honors Theses Student Work 6-2015 What's "Really Real": David Foster Wallace and the Pursuit of Sincerity in Infinite Jest Henry Clayton Union College - Schenectady, NY Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalworks.union.edu/theses Part of the American Literature Commons, English Language and Literature Commons, and the Fiction Commons Recommended Citation Clayton, Henry, "What's "Really Real": David Foster Wallace and the Pursuit of Sincerity in Infinite Jest" (2015). Honors Theses. 285. https://digitalworks.union.edu/theses/285 This Open Access is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Work at Union | Digital Works. It has been accepted for inclusion in Honors Theses by an authorized administrator of Union | Digital Works. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. What’s “Really Real”: David Foster Wallace and the Pursuit of Sincerity in Infinite Jest Henry Clayton EGL 401/402 Honors Thesis, Department of English Union College March 2015 ______________________________ Jillmarie Murphy Department of English Supervising Professor ______________________________ Anastasia Pease Department of English Second Reader Abstract What’s “Really Real”: David Foster Wallace and the Pursuit of Sincerity in Infinite Jest Henry Clayton, BA English Union College, 2015 Supervisor: Jillmarie Murphy Throughout his literary career, David Foster Wallace articulated the problems associated with the profusion of irony in contemporary society. In this thesis I assert that his novel Infinite Jest promotes a shift from the reliance on irony and subversion to a celebration of the principles of sincerity. The emphasis on sincerity makes Infinite Jest a landmark novel in the canon of American fiction, as Wallace employs postmodern formal techniques, such as irony, metafiction, fragmentation, and maximalism, in the interest of promoting traditional, non-ironic values of emotion, community, and spirituality.