From where did David Foster Wallace draw inspiration for writing style and technique?

Question

D.F.W. has a peculiar writing style. For example, in his essay, [Authority and American Usage](http://wilson.med.harvard.edu/nb204/AuthorityAndAmericanUsage.pdf), he makes use of a colloquial form of writing which is often repeated in his other essays. An example of this concerns his use of footnotes - the essay has 81 of them, and sometimes even footnotes have footnotes. This makes the essay something of a wild ride to read. An example more localized to Authority and American Usage is the colloquial use of titles. Though they draw an ironic point, it's very typical to see this in DFW's writing elsewhere:> THESIS STATEMENT FOR THE WHOLE ARTICLE > COROLLARY TO THESIS STATEMENT FOR THE WHOLE ARTICLE > INTERPOLATION POTENTIALLY DESCRIPTIVIST-LOOKING EXAMPLE OF SOME GRAMMATICAL ADVANTAGES OF A NON-STANDARD DIALECT THAT THIS REVIEWER ACTUALLY KNOWS ABOUT FIRSTHAND> ANOTHER KIND OF USAGE-WARS RELATED EXAMPLE, THIS ONE WITH A PARTICULAR EMPHASIS ON DIALECT AS A VECTOR OF SELF-PRESENTATION VIA POLITENESS...and so on and so forth. (This essay is a treasure to read.) He's even, in some other places, gone so far as to embed footnotes inside of boxes inside pages, and putting more footnotes inside those boxes, up to three or four layers deep, such as in the essay, _Host_. Did DFW ever write about where he drew inspiration for his style? Was this sort of colloquial-academic prose unique to the way he writes?

Answer 1

While I don't know the source of his inspiration, I can tell you he is not unique to this writing style (I'm not sure about the formatting). This style of using colloquial language in writing is called "code-meshing," a term coined by Vershawn Ashanti Young. While the term came after DFW, the style did not and is seen when traditional academic writing is combined with other vernaculars in the same text, such as those mentioned in "Authority and American Usage." Code-meshing is used in academic writing by Young himself, along with plenty of other academics such as Donald McCrary and Asao B. Inoue, as well as in other fiction and non-fiction writing and other forms of texts; often a particular culture may be examined in the text and so the discourse of that community is in use, but there are plenty where this is not the case. In hybrid texts, which are examples of code-meshed writing, other languages may be employed as well, and not just vernaculars of a single language. Code-meshing also applies to oral language and is how we naturally speak in our every day lives.