15-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Toronto Star
Corporate naming is taking over. Welcome to Toronto, brought to you by Rogers
In the near-future dystopia of David Foster Wallace's 1996 novel Infinite Jest, the system of identifying years by number has been abandoned. Instead, each year has a corporate sponsor: 'Year of Glad,' 'Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar,' 'Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment.'
This satirizes our often ridiculous tendency to sell naming rights. But in a fragmented narrative that jumps back and forth chronologically, it also serves as an intentional point of confusion. As a reader, you have to work out and keep track of which years come in which order.
