International David Foster Wallace Society at the American Literature Association Conference (Boston, MA, May 21-25, 2025)
The International David Foster Wallace Society will sponsor two panels at this year’s ALA; one will be a roundtable focusing on the 20th anniversary of This is Water, and the other is a traditional panel of papers.
Please send abstracts no more than 300 words, a short biography, and any a/v needs to info@dfwsociety.org no later than January 10, 2025. Please indicate ALA25 in your subject line. Updates will be posted to dfwsociety.org and the society’s social media pages (@dfwsociety).
Roundtable:
This year marks twenty years since David Foster Wallace gave his now ubiquitous commencement address to Kenyon College (2005), now titled This is Water. The DFW Society seeks scholars, emerging and established, to discuss the legacy and continued impact of This is Water.
Panel:
The DFW Society seeks submissions related to any aspect of Wallace’s fiction or nonfiction. Paper topics may include but are not limited to:
- New close readings of individual texts, especially those that might challenge conventional wisdom and established readings
- Wallace and genre fiction
- Wallace in the public sphere, including adaptations and allusions to Wallace in other media
- Wallace’s self-management of his own public image
- Wallace and race
- Wallace and cultural space
- Teaching Wallace, especially to non-majors or in departments other than English
- Wallace and “difficulty”
- Wallace and emergent media, e.g. hypertext or audiobook
All panel participants should be DFW Society members no later than May 1, 2025. See https://dfwsociety.org/membership/ for more info. No one may present more than one paper at an ALA conference. It is possible to present a paper and also participate in a round-table discussion as well as chair another panel or panels.