A01=Tim Personn
American literature
Anglo-American literature
Author_Tim Personn
Category=DS
Category=DSBJ
Category=DSM
comparative literature
contemporary fiction
contemporary literature
David Foster Wallace
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
literary criticism
literary studies
neo-romanticism
Philosophy and Literature
post-positivism
post-postmodernism
Stanley Cavell
Product details
- ISBN 9781666923186
- Weight: 585g
- Dimensions: 158 x 240mm
- Publication Date: 30 Oct 2023
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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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 To tell this story, the book draws on unpublished archival materials and understudied connections, advancing new interpretations of four novelists: David Foster Wallace, David Markson, Bret Easton Ellis, and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.
Tim Personn teaches literature and writing at the University of Victoria.
