David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest: Acquiring Post-Postmodern Shared Identity via Virtual Communication

Subject Areas : All areas of language and translation

Abdolreza Goudarzi ¹ , Morteza Lak ²

1 - English Department, Borujerd Branch, Islamic Azad University, Borujerd, Iran
2 - English Department, Science and Research Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran

Received: 2021-07-12 Accepted : 2021-09-10 Published : 2022-04-01

Keywords: Communication, Social networks, Post-postmodernism, Shared identity,

Abstract :

The current paper examines the ways David Foster Wallace’s (1962-2008) encyclopedic and all-encompassing novel The Infinite Jest, can be considered a piece of art in which the central features of post-postmodernism can be traced. Furthermore, the paper tries to investigate the nature of human identity during a time when programs, applications, and virtual products such as WhatsApp, Viber, Telegram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have made it incomprehensibly conceivable to create a sense of communication and the ability to share between those who used to be painful, fragmented, separated, and alienated in the previous era of postmodernism. Alternatively, each painful, separated, fragmented, and alienated person is thought to be a dynamic operator, communicator, and lastly, a maker as opposed to a sole inactive watcher, peruser, and one-route communicator portrayed in postmodern narratives. Employing post-postmodern criticism as the theoretical framework and utilizing the ideas of post-postmodern critics such as Fredric Jameson, Alan Kirby, and Charles Reginald Nixon, the current study unravels that humans living in the post-postmodern era have been able to successfully receive such a new personality and identity thereby making a new chance to express it to have the capacity to leave the postmodern inactiveness, passivity, and detachment.

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