After reading the accounts of the attendees of this year’s 4th annual David Foster Wallace Conference, held once again at Illinois State University, it’s clear that the state of the union of DFW studies is strong. The papers, presentations, and podcasts sowed more seeds for Wallace scholars to nurture, while the collision of conversations sparked and soldered bonds which provide sustenance for those lonely days and nights in the carrels.
The field of Evan Dara studies, on the other hand, doesn’t exactly qualify as a cottage industry yet. It has been twelve years since Jeremy Green published Late Postmodernism: American Fiction at the Millennium, which, up until now, has been the only text to offer an extensive analysis of The Lost Scrapbook. It’s a slim, decidedly non-encyclopedic volume, but it’s noteworthy that neither Wallace nor Pynchon appear, except in passing. Instead, Green offers readings of Philip Roth, John Barth, Franzen’s The Corrections, Carole Maso, Richard Powers (specifically Galatea 2.2), David Markson, Kathryn Davis’s Walking Tour, and Don DeLillo.
In the introduction, Green suggests a way of arranging the writers under consideration along a continuum of accessibility, breaking them into two camps of postmodernism:
Postmodern art, architecture, and literature can by analogy be described as “citra” and “ultra”: the citra-postmodern would be that artistic practice that returns from the radicalism of the high modernist moment to offer “the ornamental and more readily available”; the ultra-postmodern, on the other hand, would be a variety of practice that radicalizes modernism, often to the point of refusing “immediate intelligibility or sensuous gratification”….Late Postmodernism traces an arc from the citra-, particularly the fiction of Roth and Franzen, to the ultra-postmodern, best represented by Evan Dara’s challenging novel….It is a telling irony that Roth and Franzen, among the most pessimistic of the authors I address, have achieved recognition beyond the usual print-based venues of the literary public sphere….In contrast, Dara’s novel was published by a small press, and has received little recognition in any media, yet it remains an optimistic, even utopian work, because of its thoroughgoing commitment to critique and innovation.
Green picks up on numerous nuances of The Lost Scrapbook, which he covers in his final chapter, “Late Postmodernism and the Utopian Imagination.” He offers quite a bit to chew on, so I plan to revisit it here in the coming weeks. However, following its publication, few critics picked up the baton and carried it forward.
This is why it’s exciting to report that 2017—which has turned into a calamitous waking fever dream for those who are cursed by a thirst for news—brings us not one, but two significant titles that shine new light on Dara’s work. One is Emmett Stinson’s Satirizing Modernism: Aesthetic Autonomy, Romanticism, and the Avant-Garde (briefly previewed last month), which, for the first time, places The Easy Chain under the microscope.
The second is American Literature in Transition, 1990–2000, which is part of an ambitious series being rolled out in November by Cambridge University Press. They sagely tapped Stephen Burn to serve as editor for this pivotal decade:
Written in the shadow of the approaching millennium, American Literature in the 1990s was beset by bleak announcements of the end of books, the end of postmodernism, and even the end of literature. Yet as conservative critics marked the century’s twilight hours by launching elegies for the conventional canon, American writers proved the continuing vitality of their literature by reinvigorating inherited forms, by adopting and adapting emerging technologies to narrative ends, and by finding new voices that had remained outside that canon for too long. By reading nineties literature in a sequence of shifting contexts—from independent presses to the AIDs crisis; from angelology to virtual reality—American Literature in Transition, 1990-2000 provides the fullest map yet of the changing shape of a rich and diverse decade’s literary production. It offers new perspectives on the period’s well-known landmarks, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, but also overdue recognition to writers such as Ana Castillo, Evan Dara, Steve Erickson, Carole Maso.
More details will be shared as they become available, but, according to Burn, he contributed a substantial piece on Dara.
While there are no Dara conferences on the horizon, I’m eager to see the ripple effect that these books have on current and future students, and the new readers they bring into the fold.
The Evan Dara Affinity 