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Though David Foster Wallace is well known for declaring that "Fiction's about what it is to be a fucking human being," what he actually meant by the term "human being" has been quite forgotten. It is a truism in Wallace studies that Wallace was a posthumanist writer, and too theoretically sophisticated to write about characters as having some kind of essential interior self or soul. Though the contemporary, posthuman model of the embodied brain is central to Wallace's work, so is his critique of that model: the soul is as vital a part of Wallace's fiction as the bodies in which his souls are housed. Drawing on Wallace's reading in the science and philosophy of mind, this book gives a rigorous account of Wallace's dualism, and of his humanistic engagement with key postmodern concerns: authorship; the self and interiority; madness and mind doctors; and free will. If Wallace's fiction is about what it is to be a human being, this book is about the human 'I' at the heart of Wallace's work.
List of contents
Introduction 1. "It’s much more boneheaded and practical than that": Authorship and the Body 2. "He’s a ghost haunting his own body": Cartesian Dualism in Wallace’s Ghost Storie 3. "The heat just past the glass doors": Therapy, Madness, and Metaphor 4. "(At Least) Three Cheers for Cause and Effect": Free Will, Addiction, and the Self
About the author
Jamie Redgate received his PhD from the University of Glasgow. His writing has been published in Critique, Electric Literature, with the Scottish Book Trust, and elsewhere. He was shortlisted for the Imprint Writing Award in 2018.
Summary
Drawing on Wallace’s reading in the science and philosophy of mind, this book gives a rigorous account of Wallace’s humanistic response to postmodernism, and shines a much needed light on the fundamental relationship in Wallace’s work between his characters’ bodies and the ghosts that haunt them.
Additional text
Jamie Redgate’s Wallace and I is a ground breaking study of Wallace’s vision of cognition. He demonstrates that Wallace’s posthumanist leanings in the context of neuroscience rub up against a sustained adherence to Cartesian conceptions of the self. As such, Wallace’s work proposes a model of cognition wherein the brain produces a quasi-Cartesian mind that is embodied and indelibly tied to and wholly dependent upon the individual’s physical body. The book makes a genuinely innovative contribution to our understanding of Wallace’s work, one that will be immensely clarifying to future Wallace scholars.
Marshall Boswell, Rhodes College
