...In 2005, David Foster Wallace, an instructor of English and writing as well as a novelist, gave a commencement speech to the graduating students of Kenyon College dubbed “This is Water.” In 2009, a year after Wallace’s suicide, Little, Brown, and Company published a book adaptation of the speech under the guise “This is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life.” At first glance one would think that the book would just be a direct transcription of the speech itself in order to reach a wider audience. However, at closer look, it is clear that the book version has multiple instances of alteration. These alterations are caused by both the publisher itself along with the very change of the medium. Throughout the book version of “This is...
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...My response to This is Water by David Foster Wallace. I originally thought of his speech has boring and I really don’t want to hear this right now. While, listening to his speech he brought up the basic question that everyone must ask themselves. It started with the joke, “What is water?” I immediately thought of the glass half full or empty concept. We can chose to see the world has frustrated, routines, and crowd or we can chose to be happy. We can make the choice to not have this “default” setting. Wallace talks about. I thought about times I went to this default setting with my elders, my surrounding and just not thinking. I thought about my generation view on our elders. Our elder have wisdom be upon our imagination, but we are so cynical...
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...In 2005, David Foster Wallace delivered the commencement address to the graduating class at Kenyon College, which masterfully encapsulates the post-modern world of today. In “This is Water,” Wallace opens with the following “parable-ish” story: There are two young fish and they happen to meet an older fish, who nods at them and says, “Morning boys, how’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?” This opening paragraph makes us acutely aware of how “the exact same experience can mean two completely different things to two different people, given those people’s two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience.” (Wallace, p.24, 2009) It also speaks of the human’s tendency towards self-worship, where we become so self-involved that we refuse to...
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...David Foster Wallace gave an extremely memorable speech at a Kenyon University Graduation. He began with a story saying, “There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says ‘Morning, boys. How's the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes ‘What the hell is water?’"(This Is Water p.1) He explains that “The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.”(This Is Water p.1) With the story as a backdrop, he argues that the significance of liberal arts education isn’t about learning how to think, but is...
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...writing that does not like to color outside of the lines. In them, you will hear platitudes such as “this is the beginning of the rest of your life” and “go change the world” that never fail to make the audience roll their eyes. In the vast sea of mediocre commencement speeches, only a few stray from the typical commencement speech formula and are considered exceptional. One of these notable commencement speeches is “This is Water” by David Foster Wallace. In his 2005 commencement speech to Kenyon College, David Foster Wallace’s makes a complete one-eighty from the typical commencement speech; discussing complex topics that were all too vital to the baby-faced, liberal arts graduates. He tackled the...
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...York Times five years ago: “David Foster Wallace, whose prodigiously observant, exuberantly plotted, grammatically and etymologically challenging, philosophically probing and culturally hyper-contemporary novels, stories and essays made him an heir to modern virtuosos like Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, an experimental contemporary of William T. Vollmann, Mark Leyner and Nicholson Baker and a clear influence on younger tour-de-force stylists like Dave Eggers and Jonathan Safran Foer, died on Friday at his home in Claremont, Calif. He was 46.” It’s not your conventional obituary. No, it has a literary style befitting the writer we lost on September 12, 2008. And five years after DFW’s death, we might want to pause and revisit his many stories and essays still available on the web. To mark this mournful occasion, we’ve updated and expanded our list, 30 Free Essays & Stories by David Foster Wallace on the Web, which features some timely and memorable pieces – “9/11: The View From the Midwest,” “Consider the Lobster,” and Federer as Religious Experience,” just to name just a few. Below we’ve also highlighted some of our favorite David Foster Wallace posts published over the years. Hope you enjoy visiting or revisiting this material as much as I have. David Foster Wallace’s 1994 Syllabus: How to Teach Serious Literature with Lightweight Books ‘This Is Water’: Complete Audio of David Foster Wallace’s Kenyon Graduation Speech (2005) David Foster Wallace Breaks Down Five Common...
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...citizens in a pluralistic society”. In two separate readings, “This is Water” by David Foster Wallace, and in “Like Lily Like Wilson” by Taylor Mali, both have that same one core value in mind- empowerment. Mali and Wallace both speak of knowledge and the impact it has within ourselves; how learning to think and speak with conviction gives hope for a greater society. At the 2005 commencement ceremony for the graduating class of Kenyon University, David Foster Wallace spoke to the graduates on the impact of thinking. Fundamentally, human beings have a self-centeredness core, and the inner most part of everyone believes the universe solely revolves around themselves. It’s known this is not really true, but it is in our hard core wiring to believe so. It is in our wiring to believe things are happening to us, that we are victims or the product of some occurrence. In psychology, Sigmund Freud would relate this to our Id, the pleasure principle that is believed to be ingrained in us from birth. These thoughts happen so quickly; they come without much thought or question in to them. David Foster Wallace addresses the class, however, to think about these immediate thoughts, and challenge them. In a great example given by Wallace, he tells the graduates of the daily routine many know of grocery shopping. It is a habitual practice that people seem to find an automatic annoyance. Just on the drive to the grocery store, Wallace describes thoughts alike to many people when they drive themselves-...
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...Some do not know this, but Maine's central trade is not lobsters, for that precise reason, Maine is known as "vacationland" and lobsters accumulate travelers. So in the late spring of 2003, Gourmet Magazine sent the essayist David Foster Wallace to examine the ground zero of lobsters, the Maine Lobster Festival, MLF, in the heart of the mid coast area (wallace). One would envision the article would be a paean to lobsters and the exquisiteness of the Maine coast. Truth be told, Gourmet was a dream magazine for foodies and voyagers. However Wallace, a not so secluded critic and expert of savviness and talk, took the reader’s on an alternate adventure. One in which their taste buds needed to confront their consciousness. Wallace hopes to provoke self-analysis and examination of the readers’ own views on animal suffering. He does this by utilizing diverse Rhetorical devices to help engage the readers to influence them towards his contention. "Consider the...
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...The Way of Life The 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address was given by David Foster Wallace, a commencement speaker and a graduating student. DFW states stories that would happen realistically in anyone's lifetime due to the choices of one another. He points out certain flaws that each person has done but didn't realize it. He also explains the rules of patience, everyone has done it and repeats it; your actions influence another's mindset similar to yours and inflicts it on another individual who's innocent of his/her flaws. Although, people bring much negativity in the air, there is still room for positivity and that’s the drive of what keeps people going in life. In the 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address by David Foster Wallace, he preaches about the blockades that may be upon the path to your success after graduate school. DFW elaborates realistic conflicts throughout adulthood that brings about a whole other situation to achieve. For instance, "They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing" (Wallace 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address). DFW demonstrates that one action would lead to another, it may be positive or negative, but that's how the way life goes. As flaws fade, don't look back and keep pushing forward. DFW states, "To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties." He...
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...Summary In “Consider the Lobster” David Foster Wallace points out morality of animal abuse by animal-like humans. Wallace gives example as lobster and the Maine Lobster Festival. The Maine Lobster festival cooks about 25000 thousand pounds of fresh lobsters and it’s the world’s largest lobster cooker festival. Wallace tries to convince humans that it is not right to boil live creature for humanistic pleasure. The author also thinks it is not moral or ethical behavior to. Lobsters are cooked alive; Wallace expresses his feeling about Lobster, and the pain they go through. It shows inhumanity and torture lobsters experience. However some people believe that lobsters are not humans, so they don’t feel any guilty eating lobsters. Wallace sounds so depress and he also says, “Gourmet readers should also consider moral status and suffering that animal involved.” RESPONSES David Foster Wallace’s Essay, Consider the Lobster has raised a great point. How Humans treat animals, especially in America. I really enjoyed reading this essay. Being a vegetarian I am really impressed by the author’s writing. Wallace is not telling people to become vegetarians or vegans. Many people think lobster don’t have brain so they don’t feel pain. Wallace states that “It is difficult not to sense that they're unhappy, or frightened, even if it's some rudimentary version of these feelings,” showing his knowledge of the way lobsters react to the pot of boiling water. Also he says, “even if it's some rudimentary ...
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...Freedom of education prevents people from being enslaved to ignorance. Education gives people a sense of freedom, and it also gives them the option of “deciding what has meaning and what doesn’t” in their life. In David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech, The Water, he argues that education should teach us how to be well adjusted, deciding on how to think and what to pay attention to instead of going to our default setting of negativity. David Foster Wallace is right because he thinks that real education is learning to be well adjusted. Freedom of education teaches us how to decide what has and what does not have meaning in our lives, it should teach us how to think not what to think, it should be able to help us develop our critical and...
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...“Consider the Lobster” Summary 08/26/2013 David Foster Wallace’s essay “Consider the Lobster” examines the pain that Lobsters feel when they are being boiled alive to be consumed by Humans. He uses the lobster as an example to expand his examination, bringing out the relationship between humans and the animals that we consume. Wallace starts of his essay by mentioning the Maine Lobster Festival and its huge crowd of over 80,000 people that consume over 25,000 pounds of lobster during the 5 days that the festival lasts. He starts off the essay with admiration in his tone as he describes the Maine Lobster Festival to his readers. After he’s done praising the festival, Wallace reveals that his main intention of writing the essay was to question if killing animals is morally acceptable. He explains that Lobsters have nociceptors, invertebrate versions of the prostaglandins and major neurotransmitters that enable human beings to record pain. Lobsters, however, do not appear to be able to absorb natural opioids like endorphins and enkephalins which are what advanced nervous systems use to deal with pain. Wallace examines this information about lobsters and recognizes that lobster either suffer more than a human would because they can’t control pain as well as humans can or they simply can’t comprehend the idea of pain. Wallace sympathizes that if lobsters can’t control their pain, then humans are unnecessarily boiling and eating them, as a result, putting them through immense...
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...In David Foster Wallace’s speech This is Water, he puts a focus upon the gravity that adulthood is going to bring and that “everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight” will be vital in the years to come. In Joyce Carol Oates’ Heat a narrator reverts back to a time in childhood when two neighborhood twins were killed, awakening her to how real violence is in reality. Both of these stories build off a reflection standpoint that connect and divide them equally. While both stories can connect to each other through the fact of understanding life, figuring out morals and that hardships are real, the This is Water speech focuses on how to get past yourself and on with life while Heat takes a focus on being stuck remembering and questioning oneself based on the past Getting...
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...“Third Person” George Saunders’s and David Foster Wallace’s speeches to graduating classes show differing views to the aspect of a selfish world. They similarly convey the effort for one to shift their perspective in order to be considerate of others is present, yet they differ in undertone. Saunders’ depicts the path of kindness as progress with an optimistic development in the eyes of retrospective, in contrast to Wallace’s more solemn, immediate depiction of the struggle to be compassionate to humanity with little promise of a better life. David Foster Wallace’s “This is Water” demonstrated how the typical human being is pre-disposed to the idea of selfishness, especially paired with a mundane life since the only aspect, the mundane “day...
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...In his 2005 commencement address entitled “This is Water”, author and speaker David Foster Wallace emphasizes the importance of rethinking the most obvious realities as well as practicing a less self-absorbed awareness. Wallace begins his speech with a parable about a fish asking “What the hell is water?” Going on to explain how blind certainty can be damaging, Wallace affirms his point that getting lost inside one’s own head is nowhere near as rewarding and educational as paying attention to what is going on outside of the mind. Wallace further accentuates this idea by commenting on the frustration and annoyance of a typical trip to a grocery store. Wallace then advises his listeners to choose to look differently at an unpleasant situation,...
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