Contemporary scholarly work—specifically by Philip Sayers—has theorized about the role of “the Entertainment” in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Much of the focus, however, has isolated the novel’s “MacGuffin”—analyzing only its hyper-addictive nature—instead of considering its context within the corpus of James Incandenza’s filmography. What scholars have failed to address is the importance of Incandenza’s seventy-seven other films—many of which were avant-garde projects that were never released or finished—and what these filmic endeavors reveal about the tension between high art and commercial entertainment. Incandenza’s four previous attempts to complete Infinite Jest (the film) demonstrate an oscillation in his work between avant-garde art and easily palatable entertainment. Utilizing a metamodernist approach—as outlined by Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker—my paper will question high art’s tendency towards alienation, the infantile and addictive behavior commercial entertainment cultivates in its viewers, and how the fusing together of these two extremes mirrors the metamodernist theory of a coexistence between sincerity and irony, sentimentalism and cynicism, hope and melancholy. Wallace’s Infinite Jest dispels this false dichotomy and offers a method of recovery and resuscitation by contemporaneously demanding a high level of intellectual effort while delighting its audience, thus successfully fulfilling the metamodernist ideal.
About the presenterCollin Jones
Collin Jones is a recent graduate from The University of Alabama, where he studied telecommunication and film and creative writing. His philosophical interests include Kant, Schopenhauer, Peter Zappfe, Philipp Mainlander, and David Benatar. His literary interests include authors such as Albert Camus, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and David Foster Wallace. He is currently a screenwriter for John Fogel Entertainment, and intends to apply for MFA programs in creative writing for the fall of 2019.