Wallace and I - 9781138354470

Taylor & Francis

Though David Foster Wallace is well known for declaring that \""Fiction\u2019s 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\u2019s work, so is his critique of that model: the soul is as vital a part of Wallace\u2019s fiction as the bodies in which his souls are housed. Drawing on Wallace\u2019s reading in the science and philosophy of mind, this book gives a rigorous account of Wallace\u2019s dualism, and of his humanistic engagement with key postmodern concerns: authorship; the self and interiority; madness and mind doctors; and free will. If Wallace\u2019s fiction is about what it is to be a human being, this book is about the human.