New David Foster Wallace book Fall 2010

Originally published on eve.gd on 10 May 2010.

30575816-Columbia-University-Press-Catalog-Fall-2010.pdf (6182 KB)

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According to the Columbia University Press Fall Catalogue, there is a

nice treat on it's way for DFW fans! Fate, Time, and Language

An Essay on Free Will

David Foster Wallace The late novelist's legendary, unpublished work reveals the

philosophical foundations of his celebrated fiction. Long before he published Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace wrote a

brilliant critique of Richard Taylor’s argument for fatalism. In 1962,

Taylor used six commonly-accepted philosophical presuppositions to imply

that humans have no control over the future. Not only did Wallace take

issue with Taylor’s method, which, according to him, scrambled the

relations of logic, language, and the physical world, but he also called

out a semantic flaw that lie at the heart of Taylor’s argument. Wallace was a great skeptic of abstract thinking as a negation of

something more genuine and real. He was especially suspicious of certain

theoretical paradigms — the cerebral aestheticism of modernism, the

clever gimmickry of postmodernism—that abandoned “the very old

traditional human verities that have to do with spirituality and emotion

and community.” As Wallace rises up to meet the challenge of Taylor (not

to mention a number of other philosophical heavyweights), we watch the

perspective of a major novelist develop, along with a lifelong struggle

to find solid ground for his soaring convictions. This volume reproduces

Taylor’s original article and other works on fatalism cited by Wallace

in his critique. James Ryerson, an editor at the New York Times

Magazine, draws parallels in his introduction between Wallace’s

philosophy and fiction. "The real accomplishment of this work is not technical or argumentative

but more like a moral victory. David Foster Wallace's intellectual

powers have been used to set aright a world momentarily upended by an

intellectual sleight of hand. He enlists clinical argument in defense of

passionate intuition. He restores logic and language to their rightful

places."—from the Introduction by James Ryerson $19.95t / £13.95 paper 978-0-231-15157-3

$60.00s / £41.50 cloth 978-0-231-15156-6

$60.00s / £41.50 ebook 978-0-231-52707-1