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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.
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. By suggesting that Wallace's texts, characters, story-worlds, linguistic and formal choices, plots and concepts should be read as between philosophy and literature, we are
As Wallace explained to Larry McCaffery, what once intrigued him about philosophy and later literature was ‘chasing a special sort of buzz, a special moment that comes sometimes’, which he likened to the experience of a proof-completion, adding that this ‘click’ is inherently ‘aesthetic in nature’ (McCaffery, 2012 : 34–5). While philosophy and literature work according to different rules and thus ‘click’ differently, Wallace's chase after the aesthetic ‘click’ in literature is nevertheless based in nuanced philosophical inquiries. To Wallace
ability to transform such critical-theoretical ideas into fiction. Dostoevsky constituted an important example for Wallace that some philosophical problems are best approached through literature. In the work of both authors philosophy and literature operate as partly overlapping activities. In this sense Wallace's review of Frank's biography can be read as an artistic manifesto for Wallace's own fiction: whereas in previous writings, as D. T. Max notes, Wallace ‘had mostly diagnosed a disease’, in the review ‘he was [now] giving a model for the cure’ ( 2012 : 209
reconciliation but of stark contradiction. While his role in Wallace scholarship has to date been minimal, Hegel will be a central figure in the present chapter. 2 I will argue that reading Wallace's fiction ‘between philosophy and literature’, as this collection seeks to do, means passing through Hegel, whose science of logic and philosophy of history provide an alternative route to the ‘deep necessity’ that Wallace initially sought in analytic logic and math (Chodat, 2017 : 244), and whose phenomenology
This groundbreaking book highlights, for the first time, a generation of women making art to define a culture of experimental thought and practice against the backdrop of the French women’s movement, or Mouvement de libération des femmes (MLF) (1970–1981). Women’s art is viewed in relation to some of the most exciting thinkers emerging from radical trends in philosophy and literature in France in the 1970s – Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva – who are widely seen to represent the international brand of ‘French feminism’. The women artists in this book force a timely reconsideration of the full spectrum of revolutionary practices by women in the years that followed the events of May ’68.
This chapter proposes a new interpretation of two short stories included in David Foster Wallace’s 2004 collection Oblivion: ‘Incarnations of Burned Children’ and ‘Another Pioneer’. The close reading of the two texts highlights three features previously neglected. First of all, the similarities between the two main characters (children who die a violent death) and a relevant number of cross-references invite us to consider them a diptych well past their initial surface differences. Secondly, both stories examine the philosophical issue of the contested relationship between self-awareness and linguistic communication: whereas in ‘Incarnations of Burned Children’ the baby ends up dead because it screams in pain without being able to tell his parents where it hurts, in ‘Another Pioneer’ the inscrutability of the child savant is the result of an excess of rational thought and analytical language that segregate him from the village community. Thirdly, these stories show in an exemplary manner Wallace’s position between philosophy and literature: issues concerning self-awareness, the limits of human language, and the potential of thought (probably influenced by contemporary philosophers such as Nagel, Rorty, and Derrida) flow into a specific narrative form, thereby demonstrating that Wallace is not a philosopher disguised as a narrator but a writer unable to be fully philosophical (in the traditional sense) as he offers the reader questions with ambiguous answers and no exit.
It is a mark of the distinctiveness of Stanley Cavell's philosophical writing that it should arise, so often, in response to what some might imagine to be unphilosophical pressures and questions. Wittgenstein made Cavell realize that he could practise philosophy in ways that might be regarded by the discipline as unorthodox. For Cavell, scepticism about others – about other minds – is more than the failure of language to provide us with access to another. Cavell's account of literature, of its achievements and capacities, suggests instead a profound affinity between the practice and experience of art and the sense of the ordinary to be drawn from the philosophical practice of both Austin and Wittgenstein. The chapters in this book pick their routes through mutual relationships between literature, criticism and philosophy. They share, reflect on and develop some of the implications that such relationships find in Cavell's work. But they do so under different aspects, demonstrating the variety of forms these relationships can take, and suggesting lines for fruitful further enquiry. Movements and genres – modernism, romanticism, tragedy and autobiography – furnish their own configurations; so does attention to medium, language and form, and an awareness of the significance of the practice of reading. Cavell's philosophy, then, is preoccupied with describing how we might give voice to, and maintain, a significant, animated life in the face of scepticism's blankness.
10 The literal truth: Cavell on literality in philosophy and literature Timothy Gould It has been reasonably obvious that Cavell proposes some connections between philosophy and literature, and far from obvious what those connections specifically are. Since his first book, Must We Mean What We Say?, he has written so much about both philosophy and literature and suggested so many ways of thinking about their relations that it has seemed daunting to try to specify a unified approach to both fields of human endeavour. Confronted with such a project, commentators
whose relation to philosophy is perhaps most forcefully pondered across Cavell’s writing. In his essay ‘The Division of Talent’, which in its initial occasion was an address to the Association of Departments of English read at Yale in 1984, Cavell explores one way in which this relation might be mapped. As an ‘other’ to the profession of literary study, he envisages philosophy and literature as constituting alternatives.10 He is, though, also an ‘other’ to the profession of philosophy, and therefore the sense in which literature and philosophy can be figured as