[...] While Wallace may also have been referring to Pynchon, to Tennyson, More, or Lytton, or indeed to all simultaneously, the echoes of Keats throughout the text strongly suggest "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" as a--if not the--title source for the novel.
[...] "The Soul is Not a Smithy", in its invocation of Joyce's artistic credo, seems also to resist ideas of the capacity of literature to formulate and maintain a coherent identity. [...]
[...] "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature," explicitly invokes Rortian philosophy, taking its title from Rorty's 1979 book of the same name. [...]
While he tended to elide the "American" from his discussion of what it meant to be an American human being, Wallace was explicitly, exhaustingly conscious of writing from an American perspective, and repeatedly articulated his struggles with taking a perspective outside of his own. Lee Konstantinou…
[...] Scholars have drawn attention to his links with Leibniz and James, with Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard, with Cantor and deMan, as well as with Cavell [...]
