Lucas Thompson is an academic specializing in contemporary U.S. and Anglophone literature, aesthetics, and film, publishing extensively on 20th-century fiction and ordinary language philosophy.
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Popular science books invited families—especially children—to explore acoustics through hands-on experiments, transforming sound from an invisible mystery into something that could be observed, understood, and enjoyed.
By Lucas Thompson in Science | English
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Lucas Thompson is an academic fellow in writing Studies at the University of Sydney, where he teaches and writes on contemporary US and Anglophone literature, ordinary language philosophy, literary aesthetics, and film and television. Previously, he has held lecturer positions in the Department of English and at the US Studies Centre, as well as various other teaching roles at the University of Sydney, the University of New South Wales, and the University of Wollongong. Thompson has published widely on contemporary and 20th-century US fiction, and their intersections with world literature.
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‘The Rare White at the Window’
A Reappraisal of Mark Costello and David Foster Wallace’s Signifying Rappers
Co-authors: Lucas Thompson | Journal of American Studies | 2014
This article evaluates David Foster Wallace and Mark Costello’s Signifying Rappers in terms of its contribution to both early hip-hop and whiteness studies, as well as positioning the text in relation to Wallace’s career. First, the article traces many of Wallace’s subsequent thematic concerns and literary techniques back to this early text, locating the origin of some of his most characteristic stylistic devices within Signifying Rappers. Ultimately, this retrospective reading shows that far from being a mere curiosity piece in Wallace’s corpus, radically disconnected from anything he published either before or after, a close interrogation of Signifying Rappers enriches our understanding of Wallace’s work, revealing an oblique vision of Wallace striving to articulate a personal artistic agenda in response to the postmodern literary tradition.
Literary Manipulation in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest
Co-authors: Tara Colley (Morrissey)
This article reveals the centrality of manipulation to David Foster Wallace’s fiction. After surveying a range of recent philosophical work on manipulation, it shows how this particular field of inquiry can be used to illuminate Wallace’s 1996 novel Infinite Jest. The article proceeds to outline four main expressions of what Thompson labels “literary manipulation” within Infinite Jest, addressing strategic forms of manipulation concerning argumentation, thematic repetition, the anticipation of criticism, and metafictional directives. By analyzing such diverse manipulative strategies, Thomoson explores both the aesthetic and the ethical implications of Wallace’s fiction. Ultimately, the article shows how Wallace uses manipulation to dramatize the complex tension between sincerity and its antithesis.
Method Reading
Co-authors: Lucas Thompson
This article sets forth a new way of thinking about the act of reading by developing a generative metaphor that bypasses many of the problems inherent to critique—reading as a form of spontaneous method acting. This metaphor takes literary texts as invitations to engage in a particular kind of activity, wherein the reader does not merely identify with, develop sympathies for, or even recognize themselves in a fictional character, but actually performs as someone else. Using the theory and principles derived from the field of method acting, it unfolds a new model for understanding literary and aesthetic experience. This model of method reading is explored through George Saunders’s 2017 novel Lincoln in the Bardo, along with examples from the fiction of Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, and others. The article ultimately claims that this metaphor has important implications for the fields of post-critique, affect studies.
Publications by this author
David Foster Wallace and World Literature
Bloomsbury | June | 2018
David Foster Wallace is invariably seen as an emphatically American figure. Lucas Thompson challenges this consensus, arguing that Wallace's investments in various international literary traditions are central to both his artistic practice and his critique of U.S. culture. Thompson shows how, time and again, Wallace's fiction draws on a diverse range of global texts, appropriating various forms of world literature in the attempt to craft fiction that critiques U.S. culture from oblique and unexpected vantage points.
Using a wide range of comparative case studies, and drawing on extensive archival research, Global Wallace reveals David Foster Wallace's substantial debts to such unexpected figures as Jamaica Kincaid, Julio Cortázar, Jean Rhys, Octavio Paz, Leo Tolstoy, Zbigniew Herbert, and Albert Camus, among many others. It also offers a more comprehensive account of the key influences that Wallace scholars have already perceived, such as Fyodor Dostoevsky, Franz Kafka, and Manuel Puig. By reassessing Wallace's body of work in relation to five broadly construed geographic territories — Latin America, Russia, Eastern Europe, France, and Africa — the book reveals the mechanisms with which Wallace played particular literary traditions off one another, showing how he appropriated vastly different global texts within his own fiction. By expanding the geographic coordinates of Wallace's work in this way, Global Wallace reconceptualizes contemporary American fiction, as being embedded within a global exchange of texts and ideas.Rethinking Literary Experience and Interpretation
Edinburgh University Press | November | 2025
Metaphors We Read By: Rethinking Literary Experience and Interpretation is an experiment in reading and interpretation, showing how different interpretive metaphors transform our experience of literature by:
- Offering three new interpretive metaphors that transform our experience and understanding of literature.
- Making important interventions within many current debates taking place in the field of literary studies, including those relating to post-critique, aesthetics, affect studies, reception, and philosophical approaches to literature.
- Demonstrating one way of bridging the divide between lay and professional readers.
- Setting forth an innovative approach to literary criticism, drawn from the fields of cognitive linguistics and ordinary language philosophy.
- Offering an ambitious experiment in reading and interpretation, which takes up the challenge issued by Rita Felski, in The Limits of Critique, to “try out different vocabularies and experiment with alternative ways of writing.”
