Fictions of Proximity: Skepticism, Romanticism, and the Wallace Nexus [Hardcover]

Fictions of Proximity: Skepticism, Romanticism, and the Wallace Nexustells the story of a nexus of contemporary novelists around David Foster Wallace who took up the legacy of logical positivism and reworked it between the 1980s and the 2000s in a way that has affinities with romanticism. The book shows how the writers of this Wallace nexus use fictions complexities to challenge the idea that in human interactions, only complete fusion and transparency may count as instances of knowing. In place of this positivistic ideal of absorption, the book offers the freshly defined concept of proximity, a closeness with separateness. It reads key novels of contemporary Anglo-American literature as fictions of proximity, i.e., as texts that dramatize, problematize, and enact the movement into this position of proximity. To tell this story, the book draws on unpublished archival materials and understudied connections, advancing new interpretations of four novelists: David Foster Wallace, David Markson, Bret Easton Ellis, and Zadie Smith. Fictions of Proximity provides new readings of these writers, both of their canonical texts and of lesser-known works, and situates them with respect to prominent figures in contemporary post-positivist philosophy.Tim Personnteaches literature and writing at the University of Victoria.

Acknowledgments
Introduction

Part I: David Foster Wallace at the End of History

Chapter 1: Varieties of Post-Positivism: Pragmatism and Romanticism
Chapter 2: The Powerful, Dual-Functioning Part: Romantic Subjectivity in David Foster Wallace and Mark Costello's Signifying Rappers

Part II: Skepticism in Contemporary Fiction

Chapter 3: 'Looking' in 'Horror' or 'Ecstasy': Romantic Desire in David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress
Chapter 4: Brechtian Rhetoric and Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho

Part III: Ironically Earnest, Earnestly Ironic: Fiction after Positivism

Chapter 5: Aporia in l3t