Wallace and I : Cognition, Consciousness, and Dualism in David Foster Wallace’s Fiction

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. Cover Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Contents Acknowledgements Introduction: “[An] alarmed call to arms”: Cognitive Science, the Humanities, and the End of Postmodernism Wallace’s Humanist Fiction “Theory after ‘Theory’” How to Read Wallace’s Mind 1 “It’s much more boneheaded and practical than that”: Authorship and the Body The Death of David Foster Wallace The Mind behind Wallace’s Work “Cognitive Questions” “The Nature of the Fun” 2 “He’s a ghost haunting his own body”: Cartesian Dualism in Wallace’s Ghost Stories Wallace the Posthumanist Interiority in the Early Stories “I am soul” “Forever Overhead” Dualism in The Pale King “I desire to believe” 3 “The heat just past the glass doors”: Therapy, Madness, and Metaphor “A very glib guy”? “Looking at stuff under glass” Wallace’s Treatment of Doctors “A hell for one” 4 “(At Least) Three Cheers for Cause and Effect”: Free Will, Addiction, and the Self “Both flesh and not” Free Will vs. the Body Free Will after Postmodernism “An individual person’s basic personal powerlessness” “Pre-Nuptial Agreement of Heaven and Hell” Works Cited Index 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.