Hey Veeky Forums what's your favorite ghost story?

That sounds like academic overthinking, I'm sticking with ghosts user, you should too

buddy you're really detailing my thread with all this college shit. i just want to know your favorite ghost story. if you don't have one, then just move on.

>academic overthinking

Literally written by an academic.

You've "derailed" your own thread by posting a novel without any ghosts.

Maybe you want to try another thread with something more your level? Like Stephen King?

Post thesis. Or feet.

That sounds ten times worse. What a sloppy, hamfisted way to throw your opinions at the reader.

legendary thread

I'm posting from my phone wrote right now but I could actually upload a Google doc of it if there's interest.

I was thinking of publishing it after I finish my doctorate anyway.

I don't think you know what the words sloppy or hamfisted mean. He isn't "conveying" his "point" - what does that even mean?

>Google doc
Why? It's an image board.

O wait you mean the thesis. Sure, I'd be interested.

Alright, I won't be home for a while, but Veeky Forums's a slowboard so this bad boy isn't 404ing on us for hours. Keep this tab open I guess.

A Christmas Carol

This.

Also, The Catcher in the Rye

ooh, nice one. my favorite part is the cripple child.

The Wind-Up Girl
My Idea of Fun

>quoting words that didn't appear in my post

Your trolling is sloppy and hamfisted.

poe_usher

the bible

it could be both a ghost and a manifestation of authorial intention...

Look asshole, the AIs in Infinite Jest do not "chuck" the "thoughts" of the author at the reader. Those are your words, not mine.

You haven't read Infinite Jest, so why are you even posting in this thread?

The AI is in some ways a parody of hamfisted writing, but it's much more nuanced than that and demands a serious response from the reader as well. I can tell this conversation is useless, being that I'm talking to an actually drooling orangutan, but what OP brazenly (and inaccurately) calls a ghost is one of DFW's greatest contributions to literature.

No. It can't be. That would render the AI meaningless. It would stop being metafiction and devolve into mere fiction about the supernatural. This is not a point serious literary scholars debate and you'd be doing yourself a favor accepting it.

figured it wouldnt be worth making a thread for this, and so i'll ask here:

when do i read the footnotes? as they occur, or all at once at the end? the former breaks my reading flow, but if i save it for the end then they no longer seem pertinent as they are out of context

Why the fuck would a manifestation of DFWs intent just come in and fuck with a tennis game between Hal and Ortho. It's definitely a spooky ghost having a final communion with his son using the only way they could bond as a vessel, not fucking "'I like tennis' -DFW '96"

if author's intent is important to you, I believe dfw intended for them to be read as they occur, yes it breaks your flow its intended to be tedious hes a fucker

Picked up this book this week. Looking forward to starting it. Did you guys enjoy it?

The "wraith" never spooped me, but I was feeling curious as fuck.

It sounds like you've never read the book, so how the fuck would you know if it was sloppy or hamfisted? Or even a valid interpretation in the first place?

Christ, even if JOI was a fucking ghost, it still wouldn't make IJ a ghost story. Blood Meridian is not a Western, Romeo and Juliet is not a Romance, and White Noise is not Science Fiction.

OP is just trying to rustle your jimmies.

All trolling aside, the way in which you attempt to convince people of your proposition is nothing less than loathsome and only invites shitposting.

Im genuinely curious -- what is authorial intention, and how does it relate to metafiction?

>No. It can't be. That would render the AI meaningless. It would stop being metafiction and devolve into mere fiction about the supernatural
This reeks of someone coming up with a half baked thesis and putting on blinders in order to maintain it. Infinite Jest IS metafiction, but the metafiction isn't dependent on the ghost being a manifestation of the author himself. It wouldn't cease to be metafiction without this interpretation. If anything, the footnotes provide this window into authorial intent, and it is through the footnotes that DFW diverges from traditional narrative techniques.

And bragging about being among the literary scholars who are the only people that can truly comprehend Infinite Jest is not doing you any favors. Literary scholars and critics are poison to the arts.

>radical
Joyce did it decades before

You sound like a massive douche, even though I agree with you. And I still want to read your master's thesis

Another user, I'd read it. Just finished IJ recently and have gone through five or six theses on it already. I'm not an academic myself but it's some cool stuff.

Any particularly good theses you recommend user?

Same question. Any recs?

I'm doing my undergrad thesis this year. Was thinking about doing something with Wallace. Would like to read a few before starting.

thehowlingfantods.com/thesisb.htm

Yes its very good.

DOn't pussy out and stop reading 100 pages in. You have to get to roughly 250ish pages before it starts making any sense.

Its very thought provoking and it can be pretty depressing in some parts as well.

But BM is a western.

>No. It can't be. That would render the AI meaningless. It would stop being metafiction and devolve into mere fiction about the supernatural. This is not a point serious literary scholars debate and you'd be doing yourself a favor accepting it.

Well, good thing no genuinely serious literary scholars debate anything over fucking Infinite Jest.

It was a garden variety wraith

Ghosts by Cesar Aira, duh

Authorial Intervention. Authorial intention is a fallacious method of lit crit that seeks to explain the "meaning of a text" through biographical research into the life of the author.

Part of the AI involves DFW smuggling a parody of his intention into the text via the footnotes, which of course only makes his authority over the text even more tenuous. Buy like I said this is only one manifestation of the AI. Another is what OP calls the "ghost" wherein DFW inserts his will into the plot of the novel (which should be self-contained) thereby annihilating any illusion of a closed system of narrativity. This is the power of the AI and what makes it a powerful tool for the metafictionist.

I was going to respond to your post seriously but then you went ahead and spoiled it with this beauty:
>Literary scholars and critics are poison to the arts

Infinite Jest was literally written by a "literary scholar and critic" you gibbering rube.

Joyce is certainly a predecessor of DFW and no less brilliant.

Still, the AI that DFW develops is different from Joyce's more purely abstract moments of "play" where the novel (talking about Ulysses here) seems to produce its own words divorced from the indirect discourse of the characters. Consider the "love loves to love love" passage as an example.

I'll whip that thesis up as soon as I get home. Hold on to your hats.

Btw this simpleton's work isn't worth the time of day:

The Age of Bowie

>Hold on to your hats.

>Infinite Jest was literally written by a "literary scholar and critic" you gibbering rube.
Oh, I guess that makes it untrue. Sorry to inconvenience you, your lordship

That actually does make it untrue unless you consider Infinite Jest poison and not art.

Very few artists aren't also academics and critics, from Baudillaire to Pamuk.

>Baudillaire
Thank you for the time I might've wasted reading your posts

That's probably for the best. There are a bunch of typos in my posts.

You'd only greentext them to avoid thinking about a tenth grade level. Sometimes I think when stupid people read my work they physically diminish me and I get cramps in my abdomen.

Hmm I see, thanks!

Whats the specific footnote you have in mind with regards to (w/r/t ;-) ) the "parody of his intention" ? Cause we might have the same one in mind? but Im also only in my 2nd year of uni and prolly not as informed about this stuff as you

I'm unaffiliated, but y'know, you don't have to be a condescending dick on the internet just because you can.

This might be one of the first threads I've seen in weeks with actual insight, and then it has to be delivered in the most insufferable way imaginable.

God damn it lit. God fucking damn it.

>the AIs in Infinite Jest do not "chuck" the "thoughts" of the author at the reader
I was having doubts, but this sentence eliminated them. You are, without a doubt, the god of trolls. I'm genuinely in awe of your abilities. Please never stop posting.

>you don't have to be a condescending dick on the internet just because you can
I respectfully disagree.

dude, youre insufferable. i genuinely feel bad that you have the inability to interact with people in a normal, respectful manner. if it wasn't obvious enough from the fact that you are 'studying' Infinite Jest, I'd have to say that you seem legitimately autistic

Nearly all of the footnotes can be understood to be a parody of authorial intention.

Consider, for example, footnote 216 (not sure which edition you have otherwise I could give you page numbers). It reads simply "No clue." The irony of the AI is most obvious here: the footnote exists as a form for an author to assert his authority over a given text by supplying additional information, so what happens when a footnote is included to undercut that very authority?

But I wouldn't get too bogged down on the footnotes, the AI has much more fascinating manifestations that require much more complex configurations of thought.

No, anons, you are the ones who are "insufferable." Here I am, with an actual thesis under my belt and a shining future in academia, and illiterate guttersnipes on an anonymous message board have the audacity to question my life's work and in the process make it clear they've never so much as seen the book in Barnes and Nobel (I guess the Manga section is on a different floor in whatever fucktown you were spawned in). I'm not going to roll over and babytalk my way through a conversation with someone who believes DFW was some twobit purveyor of campfire stories. If you don't want me to be "mean," don't give me the occasion, you fat, sobbing voles.

Anyway, is your paper going to be posted soon? I'm genuinely interested to read it, your somewhat hilariously retarded pretension aside.

Yeah. I'll have it up as soon as I get home.

Fair warning: it's long. The AI is only part of a much larger investigation of Wallace's impact on literature.

>getting this worked up over anything on www.facehook.com/tibetan_whale_milk_recipes

There's sadly no way user could type up a thesis-long doc for this in time... chipped in too much to use a pomo generator now. Veeky Forums could've had its own rock collector document

I've been lurking for more than a day trying not to blow user's cover, but
>it's an authorial intervention (I call these AIs in my Thesis)
had me crying.

The best bait thread I've seen on Veeky Forums in years and desu there's still a 10% chance he's serious.

Actually the arc of you belief after reading should go:

>Fragmented timeline, sudden ending.
>Two causal timelines
>"True" timeline ending with match
>Discovery of second murder
>Ghost hypothesis
>Meta fiction writers shade
>Second head discovery
>Real father hypotheses
>Real ghost
> Mario Suicide premonition
>Final terminal beach ending

>there's still a 10% chance he's serious.
That's the best part

my diery tbdesu
wtf I hate myself now

How the fuck did you find your way to Veeky Forums? They are fucking with you

Explain please thank you. I'm at
> Fragmented timeline, sudden ending.
> re-read opening
> put together vague close of loop
> become sure of who sent IJ out by post
> Look at weird parabolic curve diagram and read IJ is a satellite thesis
> believe JOI ghost real
> Believe enters Stice though forehead wound
> believe Stice V Hal is fun proxy for final real interface between Hal / JOI
> unsure about how DMZ entered Hal - JOI or slow reaction from mould prompted by MJ stoppage backed up by medical attache bit ( gut flora, DMZ mould that grows on mould)
> Become V intrigued by
>Meta fiction writers shade
>Second head discovery
>Real father hypotheses
> Mario Suicide premonition
>Final terminal beach ending

It's pretty obviously a JOI ghost that says some DFW type shit about fiction writing.

I seem to have stopped at
>meta fiction shade

care to briefly enlighten me on the last 4 arrows?

Bro why would u spend time studying DFW. Don't you know he sucked?

/thread

Me too, I'm asking the dude above me

>the footnote exists as a form for an author to assert his authority over a given text by supplying additional information

That is stupid. You are stupid. Footnotes deffer authority and remove accountability from the author.

Plus David is a stupid name. Everyone I've ever known named David is someone I could see secretly wearing diapers in a weird asexual way.

"Fuck this shit, I'm out" -DFW '12

What's the point of deeply studying DFW, anyway? All he did was achieve an original way to suck.

I've known about Veeky Forums for years. It wasn't until Verso published Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous that I started visiting semi-regularly. I think the website's enforced estrangement of the ego is fascinating. I wrote up a short essay on the phenomenon that I had published in a decent university's humanities review about a year ago, but I'm a little embarrassed by some of the sources I used (I respected Chomsky then, eugh). Veeky Forums never fails to underwhelm me with the depth of its anti-intellectualism, though.

None of this meant anything to me. "JOI" is not common to any of the Wallace scholarship I've read. I'm sorry if you went through hundreds of pages of a great novel without comprehending anything. I really am.

You would be laughed out of any university unless you were some hunchbacked medievalist. I get the feeling you don't even have a GED, though. How do you pass your Sunday afternoons? Reading Sanderson?

It comes to this. A tripfag.

The politics of footnotes are steeped in authoritarianism. Their very existence is predicated on the ignorance of the reader, not the author, you monotesticled nincompoop. If the author thought a reader familiar with a given subject, he wouldn't include a footnote. DFW's subversion of the form (via the AI) is accomplished in part by the cluelessness of the voice providing the supplementary information.

If you actually missed this, I'd send you to remedial English (I can tell you're in high school), but I know that you've never so much as touched the book. Which is for the best. You're the kind of mental incompetent who can only ever devalue the things he reads. Like a moron's Midas Touch.

If you are so embedded in Wallace's work, why are you continuing to be the thing that made Wallace cringe?

All of this "academic showing off," is exactly what Wallace hated, you fuck.

this is a whole pasta store of pasta
like a boutique

You don't deserve to study Wallace. You study the mechanics of Wallace's "love" in IJ, even understand the mechanics, but are clearly not moved by them. You come off as a fucking sociopath and are a tumour on DFW's legacy.

dawg post that thesis before it 404's

>all of my posts have carefully outlined DFW's sabotaging of authorial intention
>but user why wouldn't you conform yourself to what DFW has said in his interviews

There are two types of DFW fans. There are those who watch him speak on YouTube for two minutes at a time. And there are those who actually read his books.

I think you had better consider a career in sports management or something.

>Barnes and Nobel

Thesis or GTFO

>The politics of footnotes are steeped in authoritarianism. Their very existence is predicated on the ignorance of the reader

No they are not; they are steeped in reference to authority. They point to other sources and beg you draw your own conclusion, or elaborate on the author's processes of thought to alleviate the burden of the assumption of authority writing takes on.

>tripfag
yeah man, you got me there! Do you even know what a tripcode is?

DFW was unsatisfied with IJ because he knew sociopathic readers like you wouldn't be healed after reading it. You are literally a hideous man.

"It has something to do with love."

Why don't you go back and start with the basics before you start to call yourself a serious DFW reader? I bet cliches and bromides make you cringe, even though you what they meant to DFW, you pathetic child.

I am moved by the "mechanics" (not a very good metaphor) of Infinite Jest. Often the book has brought me to tears. Often the book has had me in stitches. Nothing upsets me more that DFW was unable to finish The Pale King, because I truly believe it had the potential to be one of the greatest works of World Literature. I am not exaggerating when I say that I have dedicated my life to his texts, and especially to Infinite Jest, and that I will make a good deal of money doing so.

What I am not moved by are these idiotic babblings that Veeky Forums posters seem uniquely programmed to make. I've dealt with simpering apes who apparently believe in ghosts, I've suffered the wheezing pretensions of the uninitiated who have never read and will never read a word of Wallace, I've even taken the time out of my day to contend with sputtering moralists like yourself who are more interested in tone than content. No, I do not have the same experience reading and responding emotionally to Wallace that I have here, though I would not be surprised if you do.

But you strike me as someone, maybe, who was able to make it through the first few chapters of IJ. Tell me: what did you think of them? How would you position yourself in our little discussion of the Authorial Interventions?

I wouldn't worry too much about the thread 404ing. I'll upload the doc when I'm home.

Why don't you write an essay about how My Little Pony is an existential meditation on the authoritarian nature of the relstionship between television producers and audiences. Do you always try this hard to sound like you're an intellectual? It's giving me really intense fremdschämen so I'm going to close this thread now.

I hope you don't think it's anti-intellectualism when I say you sound like a giant blowhard.

I'm glad you asked, because I think you're basically correct, and it reminds me of my own private study of IJ (though I haven't really looked at the ghost yet, I'm just looking at how the sentences work). Yeah, I'm a moralist. Sorry for damning you so much.

By the way, you know that there really were ghosts in Infinite Jest right?

Oh, also: Okay, I do get it now, I see how you are a person who is very moved by Wallace while still being the type of person who pisses me off.

Because I don't think Wallace is enough for anyone. Not for you, not for me, not for Veeky Forums. You are changed and moved deeply by Wallace. But if it wasn't obvious, Wallace will not save you, and honestly, you should break away from him a little bit as I did.

lol if you are really in a graduate programme that is depressing

I feel sorry for you. I feel sorry for your programme. I feel sorry for your advisor. I feel sorry for the discipline in general.

>But you strike me as someone, maybe, who was able to make it through the first few chapters of IJ

please just stop

>Do you even know what a tripcode is?

I'm not racist, but I think I've finally come to understand what the mini-memebered frogposters of /pol/ feel toward blacks and Jews. Consider yourself filtered. You should probably find another thread to post in.

No, that would put you into the "sputtering moralist" category.

There are no actual ghosts in IJ. This almost feels like a dream at this point. Refer to the first post ITT:>Wallace will not save you, and honestly, you should break away from him a little bit as I did.

I read other authors regularly, but having a career in academia does depend on specialization and I've found Wallace's oeuvre fertile ground for scholarship. As for the redemptive qualities of his work, that's just your moralism acting up. I'd have that checked out if I were you.