In 2005, David Foster Wallace delivered the “This is Water” commencement speech at Kenyon College. I’ve studied and written about the most viewed commencement speeches in the past, but this one is special. In just over 20 minutes, he covers the “unsexy” yet very real realities of day-to-day adult life.
People, especially men, tell me that I’m lucky to have studied with David Foster Wallace, to have known him. I disagree. I don’t feel lucky. I feel sad. People, especially men, tell me that I can’t feel betrayed by him. They tell me about chemicals in the brain, neurons misfiring. I tell them I know about all that.
David Foster Wallace: Rhetorical Analysis (RCL 4). This was a commencement speech delivered at Kenyon College in 2005 by American author, David Foster Wallace. A textual essay version of Wallace’s speech was published in 2009, with the added subtitle “Some Thoughts, Delivered On a Significant Occasion, About Living a Compassionate Life.
David Foster Wallace yoosi barzilai Flickr. Foster Wallace reserves snoot for a “really extreme usage fanatic”, the sort of person whose idea of Sunday fun would have been to find mistakes in the late William Safire’s On Language column in the New York Times magazine. Safire was a style maven who wrote articles with intriguing opening.