Proposal

David Foster Wallace’s “This is Water” is a commencement address he delivered at Kenyon College in 2005 and is widely regarded as one of the greatest graduation speeches ever given. In addition to Wallace’s original audio, the speech has been transcribed and turned into a short book entitled This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life. The pages contain about a sentence each, stretching about four thousand words into 137 small pages. Additionally, a Los Angeles-based film company called the Glossary excerpted audio from the speech’s famous grocery store scene and combined it with video.

Compiling these variants into an edition is a valuable project for learning more about both the speech and the man who produced it. In addition to being given as a gift (in book format and most commonly for graduation), the speech is taught and analyzed in high school and college classes, probably using a non-book transcription, the original audio, the Glossary’s video, or some combination thereof. A new edition of “This is Water” is mostly geared towards the latter audience, since it will be digital and would not add much to a gift that primarily carries sentimental, rather than scholarly, value. Additionally, in light of Wallace’s 2008 suicide, the speech has taken on a new and darker meaning, particularly one passage in which he directly discusses suicide. It is also an important text because it is one of the only times Wallace publicly discussed his outlook on life. While his speech of course does not suit all tastes, Wallace’s words come across as warmly candid and humorous, and many see his stories, rhetoric, and style as worthy of admiration and analysis in their own right. An edition which combines the different media through which Wallace’s words have been produced and reproduced contextualizes the speech’s literary elements in Wallace’s life and death, offering insight into both the work and the author.

My own transcription of Wallace’s original audio, available through platforms like YouTube and SoundCloud, serves as the basis for the edition. This editorial choice is based on small errors in existing transcriptions that I found and the facts that all transcriptions seem to be working from the same audio and that no manuscript or facsimile of the speech is publicly available. The edition will digitally combine my transcription with embedded audio of the speech and the video based off of it, along with commentary about Wallace’s life and death, the speech’s remediation, and subsequent controversies.