David Foster Wallace's Germany

This article draws on numerous archival findings together with close comparative analyses to account for a number of German philosophical and literary intertexts that have hitherto gone unnoticed by Wallace scholars. It shows how the work of numerous German writers—including Georg Buchner, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Peter Weiss, Siegfried Kracauer, Max Nordau, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Herman Hesse, among others—influenced Wallace's fiction, as well as exploring Wallace's fraught relationship to German language and culture more broadly. Ultimately, the essay uses such intertextual connections to bring Wallace's work into dialogue with a radically expanded set of literary and intellectual traditions.