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Fictions of Proximity
Skepticism, Romanticism, and the Wallace Nexus
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2023
Summary
Fictions of Proximity: Skepticism, Romanticism, and the Wallace Nexus tells 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 fiction’s 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 To tell this story, the book draws on unpublished archival materials and understudied connections, advancing new interpretations of four novelists: David Foster Wallace, David Markson, Bret Easton Ellis, and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.
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Bibliographic data
Copyright year
2023
ISBN-Print
978-1-6669-2318-6
ISBN-Online
978-1-6669-2319-3
Publisher
Lexington, Lanham
Language
English
Pages
290
Product type
Book Titles
Table of contents
ChapterPages
Contents No access
Acknowledgments No access
Introduction No access Pages 1 - 18
Varieties of Post-positivism No access
“The Powerful, Dual-Functioning Part” No access
“Looking” in “Horror” or “Ecstasy” No access
Brechtian Rhetoric and Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho No access
Aporia in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest No access
“The Great Unequivocal International Gestures” No access
