Spring 2025
Prereq: none
Units: 2-0-4 Can be repeated for credit
(Second Half Term: Starts Mar 31) David Foster Wallace’s 1996 novel Infinite Jest is a “Big Book” in a number of senses. One of the masterpieces of postmodern American fiction, the novel is regularly found on best-of lists for the last half century. A novel of colossal proportions and equally massive ambitions, with a large cast of characters and frequently shifting chronology and perspectives, Infinite Jest is a novel whose maximalism, overwhelming at times, reflects the chaotic enormity of the world it describes. Both clear-eyed and fabulist, probing and problematic, the novel addresses geopolitical conflict, ecological crisis, information overload, postirony, addiction and recovery, and more.
IJ is placed in a number of settings, but much of its action takes place in the greater Boston area. Some of the local sites Wallace describes are now gone, some are imaginary, but most are still around, including some landmarks on the MIT campus. Students will have the opportunity to generate site-specific readings through exploratory trips into the community, virtual mapping of the novel, or both.