DIEGO ROBERTO NEVES TAVARES

David Foster Wallace (1962 - 2008) is an author whose central problem is the growing processes of desubjectivisation of the Subject, based on the cogito, the unconscious, its prerogatives of autonomy and emancipation. He addresses the issue of entertainment and its use as a weapon that accelerates the process of objectifying individuals in favor of a format that conditions them to consume images, postures, lifestyles, and other products offered in contemporary times. Wallace's thinking takes as its problem the relationship between entertainment and contemporary technologies, and the way they are arranged in the world.
This dissertation analyses the individual, boredom, and entertainment in contemporary times, taking the author's work as a starting point, with particular attention to the novel Infinite Jest (1996). The proposed analysis does not follow the tradition of literary analyses, and the central themes are not those of narrative composition, its formal structures, the development of characters, time, and space. The main point here is not normative but rather philosophical, historical, and sociological.