In 1962, the philosopher Richard Taylor used six commonly accepted presuppositions to imply that human beings have no control over the future. David Foster Wallace not only took issue with Taylor’s method but also noted a semantic trick at the heart of Taylor’s argument.
Fate, Time, and Language presents Wallace’s brilliant critique of Taylor’s work. Wallace’s thesis reveals his great skepticism of abstract thinking made to function as a negation of something more genuine and real. He was especially suspicious of the cerebral aestheticism of modernism and the clever gimmickry of postmodernism, which abandoned “the very old traditional human verities that have to do with spirituality and emotion and community.” As Wallace rises to meet the challenge to free will presented by Taylor, we witness the developing perspective of this major novelist and his struggle to establish logical ground for his convictions. This volume, edited by Steven M. Cahn and Maureen Eckert, reproduces Taylor’s original article and other works on fatalism cited by Wallace. James Ryerson’s introduction connects Wallace’s early philosophical work to the themes and explorations of his later fiction, and Jay Garfield supplies a critical biographical epilogue. “Fatalism, the sorrowful erasure of possibilities, is the philosophical problem at the heart of this book. To witness the intellectual exuberance and bravado with which the young Wallace attacks this problem, the ambition and elegance of the solution he works out so that possibility might be resurrected, is to mourn, once again, the possibilities that have been lost.” REBECCA NEWBERGER GOLDSTEIN, author of Thirty-six Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction DAVID FOSTER WALLACE (1962–2008) wrote the acclaimed novels Infinite Jest and The Broom of the System and the story collections Oblivion, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and Girl with Curious Hair. His nonfiction includes the essay collections Consider the Lobster and A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and the full-length work Everything and More. COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS / NEW YORK www.cup.columbia.edu
$19.95
ISBN: 978-0-231-15157-3
COVER DESIGN: Marc Cohen
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will
“I think Dave, foremost among a group of writers that also includes George Saunders and Rick Moody, created a new American literary idiom through which people who are young, or who aren’t young but still feel like they are, can give voice to the full range of their intelligence and emotion and moral sensibility without feeling dorky and uncontemporary. It’s very hard to read Dave and not feel almost peer-pressured to emulate him—his style is utterly contagious. But none of his emulators have his giant talent or his passionate precision. Somebody could write a whole monograph on how deliberately and artfully he deploys the modifier ‘sort of.’ ” JONATHAN FRANZEN, New York Times Book Review
51995
COVER PHOTO: Steve Liss / Time Life / Getty Images
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DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
An Essay on Free Will