Wallace and I: Cognition, Consciousness, and Dualism in David Foster Wallaces Fiction [Hardcover]

Though David Foster Wallace is well known for declaring that Fictions 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 Wallaces work, so is his critique of that model: the soul is as vital a part of Wallaces fiction as the bodies in which his souls are housed. Drawing on Wallaces reading in the science and philosophy of mind, this book gives a rigorous account of Wallaces dualism, and of his humanistic engagement with key postmodern concerns: authorship; the self and interiority; madness and mind doctors; and free will. If Wallaces fiction is about what it is to be a human being, this book is about the human I at the heart of Wallaces work.

Introduction  1. Its much more boneheaded and practical than that : Authorship and the Body  2. Hes a ghost haunting his own body : Cartesian Dualism in Wallaces 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

 

Drawing on Wallaces reading in the science and philosophy of mind, this book gives a rigorous account of Wallaces humanistic response to postmodernism, and shines a much needed light on the fundamental relationship in Wallaces work between his characters bodies and the ghosts that haunt them.

Jamie Redgate received his PhD from the University of Glasgow. His writing has been published in Critique, Electric Literature, with the ScottilC�