The Problem of Free Will in David Foster Wallace

著者名：Pitari, Paolo

Routledge（2024/06/27発売）

• 言語：ENG
• ISBN：9781032676678
• eISBN：9781040044650

Description

This book argues that David Foster Wallace failed to provide a response to the existential predicament of our time. Wallace wanted to confront despair through art, but he remained trapped, and his entrapment originates in the "existentialist contradiction": the impossibility of affirming the meaningfulness of life and an ethics of compassion while believing in free will.

To substantiate this thesis, the analysis reads Wallace in conversation with the existentialist philosophers and writers who influenced him: Søren Kierkegaard, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. It compares his non-fiction with the sociologies of Christopher Lasch, Zygmunt Bauman, Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, and Anthony Giddens. And it finds inspiration in Giacomo Leopardi, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Emanuele Severino to conclude that the philosophy which pervades Wallace’s works entails despair and represents the essence of our civilization’s interpretation of the world.

Table of Contents

Preface: The problem of free will

Introduction: The problem of free will in David Foster Wallace

Part one: Literary truth according to David Foster Wallace

Chapter 1: The influence of Leo Tolstoy’s What Is Art? on David Foster Wallace’s literary project

Chapter 2: The influence of Jean-Paul Sartre’s “What Is Literature?” on David Foster Wallace’s literary project

Part two: The problem of free will in David Foster Wallace’s literary sociology

Chapter 3: The system of David Foster Wallace’s literary sociology

Chapter 4: On narcissism: David Foster Wallace and Christopher Lasch

Chapter 5: On morality and the absurd: David Foster Wallace and Zygmunt Bauman

Chapter 6: On existentialism and capitalism: David Foster Wallace and Ulrich and Elisabeth Beck

Chapter 7: On ontological insecurity: David Foster Wallace and Anthony Giddens

Part three: The problem of free will in David Foster Wallace’s fiction: A comparative reading of Fyodor Dostoevsky and David Foster Wallace

Chapter 8: A critical history of the philosophical criticism on Fyodor Dostoevsky and David Foster Wallace

Chapter 9: Fyodor Dostoevsky, Mikhail Bakhtin, and David Foster Wallace: United in existentialism

Chapter 10: The problem of free will in Crime and Punishment and The Pale King

Bibliography

Index