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The USA of the late 20th and early 21st centuries in David Foster Wallace’s novels: geography, domestic policy, and the concept of citizenship
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Violetta Alexandrovna Kaiavo
Ural Federal University named after the first President of Russia B. N. Yeltsin, Yekaterinburg
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Submitted:
March 25, 2026
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Abstract.
The aim of this study is to identify the peculiarities of the US image in the late 20th – 21st centuries in the novels of David Foster Wallace (1962-2008). The article focuses primarily on the author’s views on contemporary US domestic politics and his evaluation of the influence of neoliberalism on the concept of American citizenship, including the country’s geography. The originality of this study lies in the fact that the image of America is examined for the first time as a dominant feature of D. F. Wallace’s oeuvre; the preconditions for the country’s current state, as presented by the author in his novels, are examined as well. The study establishes that in “The Pale King” D. F. Wallace explored the period from the late 1960s to the 1980s, using historical facts and neoliberal policies as a prehistory to the events of “The Broom of the System” and “Infinite Jest” – novels that illustrate America of the 1990s and 2000s in the social, political, and cultural crisis; fantastic, grotesque elements largely form the world of the author’s first two works. Furthermore, “The Broom of the System” and “The Pale King” form a unity in their depiction of the Midwest: in the debut novel, the region is commercialized but possesses the characteristics of “the American heartland”; however, in “The Pale King”, the Midwest loses its identity. D. F. Wallace, basing on C. Lasch’s concept of “the culture of narcissism”, criticized American domestic politics and capitalism, which lead to the loss of civic duty and the transformation of people into indifferent consumers.
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Key words and phrases:
Дэвид Фостер Уоллес
американская проза XX-XXI вв
контркультура 1960-1970-х гг
неолиберализм
Кристофер Лэш
David Foster Wallace
American prose of the 20th-21st centuries
counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s
neoliberalism
Christopher Lasch
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