S.J. Burn

Toward a General Theory of Vision in Wallace's Fiction

Taking David Foster Wallaces The Pale King as an exemplary text, “Toward a General Theory of Vision in Wallaces Fiction” examines the multiple roles that vision and the neurophysiology of sight play in Wallaces work. Tracing the primacy of vision back to “E Unibus Pluram”s vision of the writer as a “born watcher” and contextualizing Wallaces treatment of the eye against his scientific sources, the essay argues that close attention to Wallaces obsession with vision helps reformulate our understanding of the novels structure (and its “unfinished” status), the books relation to Wallaces ongoing dialogue with metafiction, his characterization and other strands of the books narrative strategies.

“Webs of Nerves Pulsing and Firing”: Infinite Jest and the Science of Mind

David Foster Wallace’s second novel, Infinite Jest, had a long gestation. As Wallace explained to Marshall Boswell, he began the book, “or something like it, several times. ’86, ’88, ’89. None of it worked or was alive. And then in ’91–’92 all of a sudden it did” (letter). The finished book “worked” and “was alive” to the extent that Infinite Jest now stands, by common critical consent, at the heart of Wallace’s oeuvre. As his longest book, the novel deliberately overloads generic conventions, flaunting stylistic display and demonstrating an encyclopedic range of knowledge that courses through sport, national identity, addiction, media theory, linguistics, and mathematics.1 Yet for all the book’s intellectual plenitude and exuberant humor, it is also an anatomy of melancholy, and as the millennial self inventories its increasingly empty estate, the book becomes a harvest of souls, chronicling different ways to suffer.

Reading the Multiple Drafts Novel

This essay outlines the formal characteristics and critical relevance of the “Multiple Drafts Novel,” a neuroscientifically-informed subgenre whose prominence is often obscured by the dominance of social and historical concerns in studies of contemporary British fiction. By reading a sequence of novels by Andrew Crumey, Tom McCarthy, and David Mitchell, alongside Daniel Dennett’s Multiple Drafts model of consciousness, this essay argues that a cognitively-informed analysis of the contemporary novel not only can reformulate our understanding of specific novels, but also can provide new perspectives on problems inherent within critical construction of literary postmodernism.

Neuroscience and Modern Fiction

Introducing a special issue on neuroscience and modern fiction, this essay surveys current work on literature and brain research, outlining the issue’s structure and guiding philosophy. To map out what is at stake in such readings, the introduction offers a sustained reading of Don DeLillo’s Ratner’s Star, placing it into a larger social and historical context that reveals its extensive engagement with (often popular) neuroscientific source material. This reading provides an entry point into a consideration of the asymmetrical historical distribution of cognitive literary studies, especially their comparative neglect of post-1900 fiction, and sets the scene for the essays that follow.

American Literature in Transition: 1990-2000

Written in the shadow of the approaching millennium, American literature in the 1990s was beset by bleak announcements of the end of books, the end of postmodernism, and even the end of literature. Yet, as conservative critics marked the centurys twilight hours by launching elegies for the conventional canon, American writers proved the continuing vitality of their literature by reinvigorating inherited forms, by adopting and adapting emerging technologies to narrative ends, and by finding new voices that had remained outside that canon for too long. By reading 1990s literature in a sequence of shifting contexts - from independent presses to the AIDS crisis; from angelology to virtual reality - American Literature in Transition, 1990–2000 provides the fullest map yet of the changing shape of a rich and diverse decades literary production. It offers new perspectives on the periods well-known landmarks, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, but also overdue recognition to writers such as Ana Castillo, Evan Dara, Steve Erickson, and Carole Maso.

Economies of the Self

Yet, unlike The Lost Scrapbook’s captured voices, the early speeches in The Easy Chain are initially unconvincing as dialogue. Dara wants to create a full, and fairly traditional, backstory for his character—his parents’ first meeting, formative early experiences, his discovery of “books as passports”— and the long speeches needed for this material don’t naturally mesh with the chosen technique. Once Lincoln’s genealogy has been established, however, the novel moves more fluidly, and Dara rapidly cuts between scenes with few explicit signals, and the juxtapositions deftly establish a kind of narrative mosaic. Lincoln barely speaks through this succession of different voices, but one of the unifying strands through the rapidly shifting focus records his efforts to locate his aunt—Virginia Coons—who emigrated to Chicago in the 1980s. After nearly two hundred pages, the first part begins to conclude as a very oblique description— “A taxi. Hit—”—summarizes the event that leads to the death of a major character, Lincoln’s publicist, Auran Beede. Her death is later deemed an “apparent suicide,” but at this point, her demise (intertwined with other stories) marks the end of part one, as confused voices lead into silence. The second part of the book—separated off by forty near-blank pages—is an inversion of the first section: Lincoln now returns to origins, retracing his steps back to Amsterdam. The narrative focus splits to cover a series of difference searches, each of which fetishizes individuality. Lincoln searches for his mother; a journalist, Tracy Krassner, probes Lincoln’s disappearance from Chicago for a story that absurdly inflates his importance; and agents of collection services hunt Lincoln, claiming he “robbed every single credit card he could peel from the backing paper.” Dara’s technique shifts through this section—Lincoln’s movements are followed by a third-person narrator; Krassner’s story is told through a sequence of emails; the credit agents reach the reader as disembodied voices. Numerous other stories mingle with these three main plotlines— including first-person narration by some clothing (“I hug in the right places”)—but as this section comes toward its end, the narrative system reaches overload, breaking down into a near-forty-page poem: