The Problem of Free Will in David Foster Wallace (Routledge Research in American Literature and Culture)

This book argues that David Foster Wallace failed to provide a response to the existential predicament of our time. Wallace wanted to confront despair through art, but he remained trapped, and his entrapment originates in the "existentialist contradiction": the impossibility of affirming the meaningfulness of life and an ethics of compassion while believing in free will. To substantiate this thesis, the analysis reads Wallace in conversation with the existentialist philosophers and writers who influenced him: Søren Kierkegaard, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. It compares his non-fiction with the sociologies of Christopher Lasch, Zygmunt Bauman, Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, and Anthony Giddens. And it finds inspiration in Giacomo Leopardi, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Emanuele Severino to conclude that the philosophy which pervades Wallace’s works entails despair and represents the essence of our civilization’s interpretation of the world. Cover Endorsements Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Contents Preface: The problem of free will Introduction: The problem of free will in David Foster Wallace PART I: Literary truth according to David Foster Wallace 1. The influence of Leo Tolstoy’s What Is Art? on David Foster Wallace’s literary project 2. The influence of Jean-Paul Sartre’s “What Is Literature?” on David Foster Wallace’s literary project PART II: The problem of free will in David Foster Wallace’s literary sociology 3. The system of David Foster Wallace’s literary sociology 4. On narcissism: David Foster Wallace and Christopher Lasch 5. On morality and the absurd: David Foster Wallace and Zygmunt Bauman 6. On existentialism and capitalism: David Foster Wallace, Ulrich Beck, and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim 7. On ontological insecurity: David Foster Wallace and Anthony Giddens PART III: The problem of free will in David Foster Wallace’s fiction: A comparative reading of Fyodor Dostoevsky and David Foster Wallace 8. A critical history of the philosophical studies on Fyodor Dostoevsky and David Foster Wallace 9. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Mikhail Bakhtin, and David Foster Wallace: United in existentialism 10. The problem of free will in Crime and Punishment and The Pale King Afterword: A response to criticism Acknowledgments Bibliography Index