Ordinary Unhappiness expands on arguments presented in Baskin’s 2009 essay and incorporates materials he wrote for his subsequent PhD thesis, some of which were first published in an anthology on Wallace and philosophy in 2014.
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But while the slim volume represents the best that popular writing on academic topics has to offer, the stated intention behind the Square One series to publish books that are “accessible” to a “broad, educated readership” seems to have led to some strategic choices-such as Baskin’s decision to prioritize Wallace’s fiction over the author’s non-fictional work and to simplify key debates for ease of exposition-that run the risk of compromising the scholarly impact of this otherwise critically important intervention.
And the publication of his recent study Ordinary Unhappiness: The Therapeutic Fiction of David Foster Wallace by Stanford University Press as part of their Square One series is further evidence that academia could not ignore this exciting critical voice for long. Still, Baskin eventually joined academia in 2018 as associate director at the New School for Social Research. Five years later, Baskin was named by the Chronicle of Higher Education as one of the “new intellectuals” (see Goldstein), part of a group of young para-academics who prefer engagement in the public sphere to participation in an academic institutional landscape in crisis. In keeping with its title, the essay was a statement on David Foster Wallace’s untimely death the year before, an early assessment of his legacy as more in line with the modernist task of attending to the problems of subjectivity than with postmodernist diagnoses of culture. In 2009, an essay entitled “Death is not the End” appeared in the inaugural issue of The Point, a literary magazine that had been co-founded on the campus of the University of Chicago by the essay’s author, Jon Baskin. Jon Baskin, Ordinary Unhappiness: The Therapeutic Fiction of David Foster Wallace ( Stanford University Press, 2019): ix + 179pp
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