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Before the publication of Infinite Jest in 1996, no less than a dozen excerpts from Wallace’s novel had already been published in various journals and magazines. The essay presents the first complete overview of these previously neglected excerpts and analyzes how they frame Infinite Jest. Drawing on theories by Bryant, McGann and Bhaskar, the analysis shows that the excerpts function as ‘paracontent’ that occupies a gray area between self-contained content and marketing. The essay then considers the sum of excerpts, which exhibits a surprising bias in favor of certain parts of Wallace’s novel, and discusses the implications of this imbalance.

The digitization of the publishing business has provided publishers with new media and new means of distribution, which in turn have created new modes of reading. The impact of the digital revolution on the production and distribution of literature has already been widely discussed, but much less has been written about how current media developments have affected reading and readers. A central thesis of this special issue is that the phenomenon of reading should be studied from various disciplinary perspectives. Reading as a phenomenon evolves in the intersections among media developments, literary trends, and social practices. By bringing together scholars from literary theory, media studies, aesthetics, anthropology, psychology, and linguistics, the special issue explores different perspectives on how the technological, sensorial, cognitive, participatory, and aesthetic aspects of reading have evolved in recent decades. Reading practices are changing rapidly in close conjunction with the evolving formats in which literature is distributed to its readers. The purpose of the special issue is to provide a forum in which to rethink existing categories and challenge prevalent notions of reading.

In a recent article, Kate Marshall identifies “an emerging body of US fiction located firmly within the strata and sediment of the Anthropocene,” focusing exclusively on twenty-first century literature. A similar chronological focus shapes discussions of the related concept of planetarity, which was first introduced in literary theory in Spivak’s Death of a Discipline (2003). The tendency to relegate anthropocenic and planetary concerns to this millennium is prevalent, and it is evident in the reception of Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (both 2006). However, anthropocenic and planetary concerns have been around much longer in literary fiction, and the two authors have treated them much more elaborately in their most important works, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) and Blood Meridian (1985). Both novels were written before concepts of the Anthropocene and planetarity became theoretical staples, but I aim to show that their thoughts on humanity and the planet prefigure the recent literary works that critics have centered their discussions of the Anthropocene on. Furthermore, I will show how both novels reflect on language as yet another technology that violates nature’s continuum, and how language is thus presented by Pynchon and McCarthy as a significant force in the Anthropocene.

Digital media have provided new avenues of distribution for serial fiction and created new narrative possibilities for the form, including the widespread use of what Margolin labels "concurrent narration" and Page terms "real-time narration." This form of serial publication, where a story is distributed in installments coterminously with the events being reported, is enabled by the Internet's possibilities for instantaneous transmission, and it appears in narratives on various platforms that rely on the web for content distribution. To discuss this temporal confluence of the narrated, narration, and publication, we analyze the use of concurrent narration in two digitally distributed serialized narratives, David Mitchell's Twitter story "@I_Bombadil" (2015), and the Norwegian webserial Skam (2015–17), both of which were originally transmitted piecemeal in near-concurrence with the narrated events. Furthermore, we analyze the participation surrounding the two stories. Serial fiction has always encouraged the active engagement of its audience, and this tendency becomes especially pronounced when stories are distributed via social media that allow for rapid exchanges between readers. The participatory practices that emerge in the wake of digitalization are often conceived as inherently democratic forms of engagement, but this predominantly positive conception may be questioned, since participation is a complex concept that covers a range of different practices. By analyzing the participation that surrounds "@I_Bombadil" and Skam we nuance the perspective on digitally enabled participatory culture and thus contribute to a better understanding of how new digital forms of distribution affect the modes of narrating and engaging in serialized narratives today. (Less)

In his 1993 interview with Larry McCaffery, David Foster Wallace famously proclaimed postmodern authors like John Barth, Thomas Pynchon and Vladimir Nabokov to be his real enemies, patriarchs for his patricide. This unambiguous statement of aesthetic intent laid down a clear set of guidelines for literary critics, and much of the subsequent critical reception of Wallace has followed the path set down by Wallace in the early 1990s. While there are obvious advantages to following Wallace's guidelines, an exclusive focus on his complex agon with his literary forebears runs the risk of obscuring some of the pronounced continuities between Wallace and his postmodern predecessors. One of these continuities is the crucial theme of paying attention. This theme is at the centre of much of Wallace's fiction, but it also plays a decisive part in novels written by the patriarchs for Wallace's patricide, and by tracing the theme through Wallace's work as well as through novels by Nabokov and Pynchon the article argues...

Drawing on various theories of the materiality and mediality of literature, the essay argues that a focus on the material history of any given literary work can provide a more nuanced understanding of various literary historical processes than traditional textual analysis. Taking different physical editions of Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 as its starting point, the essay traces the constantly evolving exchanges between the progressive material incarnations of Pynchon's novel and the cultural context, laying bare some of the complex literary historical, cultural, and institutional processes that contributed to the canonization of The Crying of Lot 49.

Taking Horace Engdahl’s critique of the insularity of American literature as its starting point, the essay goes on to discuss Richard Gray’s and Michael Rothberg’s recent articles in 'American Literary History', both of which call for a literature capable of addressing the contemporary global reality. While both Gray and Rothberg claim that such a literature has yet to be written, the essay argues that Thomas Pynchon’s three novels 'Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason & Dixon' and 'Against the Day' can profitably be read together as an ambitiously conceived world-historical trilogy which tells the story of the gestation and emergence of our contemporary global reality.

Taking the late David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest and Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow as its starting points, the article traces the significant influence of paratextual matters, in this case dust jackets, on the critical construction of the literary work. The essay combines textual analysis with a focus on the materiality and mediality of the text and book, and situates itself in the space between literary history and book history.