A Fiction of Response: Girl with Curious Hair in Context

Abstract

David Foster Wallace’s second book, Girl with Curious Hair, is best known for its concluding 144-page novella, “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way.” Along with Wallace’s 1993 essay, “E Unibus Pluram,” with which it is often paired, “Westward” has come to be seen both as a “manifesto” for fin-de-siecle fiction’s “next step” (Boswell, Understanding 68; Cohen 72) and the key to Wallace’s subsequent work. While not ignoring “Westward,” this essay argues that the novella should be read in the context of the collection as a whole, and that the volume itself should be read in the context of the place and time of its composition: specifically that of the 1980s intersections between graduate creative writing programs and the “economically viable domains of serious middlebrow fiction” (McGurl 29). Girl with Curious Hair can been seen both as an exemplary product of what Mark McGurl has dubbed “the program era”—Wallace wrote the stories while enrolled in the University of Arizona’s MFA program—and as an interrogation of that era’s modes and mores. In other words, as much as any literary critic, Wallace took his subject to be “the increasingly intimate relation bet ween literary product ion and the practices of higher education” (McGurl ix). He was an avid reader of fiction by his MFA contemporaries, of the literary theory that then flourished in the academic side of the English Department, and of works of literary criticism that sought to ascertain the state, actual and potential, of the American novel.