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This chapter analyses ‘Good Old Neon’, detailing the reader’s progressive coming to terms with its multi-layered structure. The reader encounters Neal, who speaks and imagines, David Wallace, who stares and imagines, and David Foster Wallace, who writes and imagines.
In delving into these three layers and exploring the centrality of imagination, the chapter demonstrates why a reflection on the shifting referents of the second-person pronoun is necessary to understand the dynamics of the text and why Neal’s posthumous positioning and its inherent privileges – first and foremost omniscience – open up a reflection on the kind of authorship Wallace is interested in. Being-posthumous provides a frame, an interpretative key, that juxtaposes knowledge with invention.
This reading proposes to consider Wallace’s short story as ultimately staging a meditation on how literary imagination may counterbalance and somehow undo the ending – opening up the possibility of endlessness. The overall argument is that the kind of imagining activated here is the essence of literature itself: the experience of close-reading the short story invites to consider it as thematizing, indirectly, what literature is all about according to David Foster Wallace. This aboutness concerns, crucially, the possibility of caring and compassion, past the pervasiveness of fraudulence and past the manipulative attitude that fraudulence entails.
In David Foster Wallace’s fiction, long-standing philosophical debates – does language describe the world accurately? can I explain myself to others? what are the values and dangers of self-consciousness? how can I lead a meaningful life? – play a central role. In fact the need to explore these debates as representing urgent problems of contemporary human existence is what motivated Wallace’s ‘occupational switch’ from philosophy to literature.
This volume presents new essays by prominent and promising Wallace scholars that show that Wallace’s work originates in-between philosophy and literature. Its philosophical dimension is not a mere supplement or decoration, a finishing touch to perfect his literary writing; nor is it the other way around: a pre-established truth the literary serves to illustrate. Rather in Wallace the two discursive modes are always already intertwined in a never-ending process of cross-fertilization. This approach constitutes an investigative perspective that allows for a variety of theories and methods to shed light on the constitutive in-betweenness of Wallace’s oeuvre – instead of imposing a preconceived methodology or a theoretical context that univocally homogenizes each single reading. The essays included offer a plurality of interpretations of Wallace’s engagement with philosophy and literature.
Organized in three parts – ‘General perspectives’, ‘Consciousness, self, and others’, and ‘Embodiment, gender, and sexuality’ – this volume breaks new ground: it shows that Wallace’s texts, characters, story-worlds, linguistic and formal choices, plots and concepts are all to be read ‘between’ philosophy and literature, and thus provides a highly valuable contribution to the field of Wallace studies.
This collection aims to show that David Foster Wallace’s work originates from and functions in the space between philosophy and literature. Indeed, the philosophical dimension of his work is not a mere supplement or decoration, a finishing touch to perfect his literary writing. Nor is it the other way around: a pre-established truth which Wallace sees the literary merely serving to illustrate. Rather Wallace intertwines the two discursive modes in a never-ending process of reciprocal cross-fertilization. In this introductory chapter we first briefly address Wallace’s relation to and career switch between philosophy and literature, in order to argue that, for Wallace, philosophy and literature are co-originating ways of confronting reality: philosophical works, styles, and concepts trigger literary experiences, while literary works, styles, and genres trigger philosophical questioning. Both appear within and amplify each other from the start. Then we outline three aspects in which philosophy and literature both differ and overlap – but never fully dissolving into one another – namely: (1) as activities or practices; (2) with regards to their instruments, i.e. their forms of language and communication; and (3) with regards to their purposes, or the experiences and possible understandings they generate. The work of David Foster Wallace is exemplary of this fruitful cross-pollination. Finally, we outline the chapters in this collection that, organized in three parts – ‘General perspectives’ (Wallace’s aesthetics, interest in performativity, formal choices, sociology, and ethics), ‘Consciousness, self, and others’, and ‘Embodiment, gender, and sexuality’ – represent a multifaceted engagement with the philosophical-literary in-betweenness of Wallace’s oeuvre.