David Foster Wallace, Technology and the Self

• Thesis title in Czech: David Foster Wallace, technologie a identita
• Thesis title in English: David Foster Wallace, Technology and the Self
• Key words: David Foster Wallace|Technologie|Já|Jáství|Existencialismus|Posthumanismus|Postmodernismus|Televize|Současná beletrie|Americká beletrie
• English key words: David Foster Wallace|Technology|Self|Selfhood|Existentialism|Posthumanism|Postmodernism|Television|Contemporary Fiction|American Fiction
• Academic year of topic announcement: 2018/2019
• Thesis type: diploma thesis
• Thesis language: angličtina
• Department: Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures (21-UALK)
• Supervisor: doc. Erik Sherman Roraback, D.Phil.
• Author: hidden - assigned and confirmed by the Study Dept.
• Date of registration: 10.12.2018
• Date of assignment: 10.12.2018
• Administrator's approval: not processed yet
• Confirmed by Study dept. on: 12.12.2018
• Date and time of defence: 10.09.2019 00:00
• Date of electronic submission: 19.08.2019
• Date of proceeded defence: 10.09.2019
• Submitted/finalized: committed by student and finalized
• Opponents: Mgr. Pavla Veselá, Ph.D.

Guidelines

MA Thesis Proposal
My research will focus on the extent to which David Foster Wallace's engagement with technology defines his conception of selfhood after postmodernism. Examining both his fiction and non-fiction, I will argue that Wallace's conception of selfhood moves from an initial reaction to postmodern tropes of irony and self-reflexivity having been made culturally dominant by the proliferation of entertainment technology, to one centred on a critique of posthumanism and the implications of machines assuming human roles. I aim to show how Wallace complicated his view of technology as defining contemporary selfhood in the wake of postmodernism - in, for instance, his essay 'E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction' (1993) and in Infinite Jest (1996) - through his increased interaction with posthumanist ideas, resulting in a view of technology as potentially erasing selfhood (apparent in his unfinished novel The Pale King (2011)). To do this I will follow Wallace's early focus on pervasive entertainment technologies in particular - epitomised, in his most famous work, by the fatally captivating Infinite Jest film cartridge - to information technologies in general, most significantly the less visible but equally portentous data processors threatening IRS agents in The Pale King.
Despite new areas of research in Wallace Studies, his engagement with technology remains under-examined and is frequently elided in a way that positions the author as a purely literary entity. 'Wallace and his World', the opening section of Hayes-Brady's Unspeakable Failures, for example, develops Wallace's influences outside postmodernists such as Thomas Pynchon and John Barth, bringing into consideration his reading of British Romanticism among others, but Wallace's world as described by Hayes-Brady remains firmly embedded in the written word; her brief mention of technology suggests it simply 'offers a perspective from which Wallace's writing approached the shifting landscape of contemporary American life'. I will argue in my thesis that Wallace did not view technology as passively as Hayes-Brady proposes, but instead used it in his work as the most active force of disruption in the 'shifting landscape' of life at the turn of the century - Wallace himself warned in 'E Unibus Pluram' against 'the temptation not to take television seriously as [...] a definer of the cultural atmosphere'
While the topic of Wallace and technology remains under-researched, there is existing criticism in this field upon which my thesis can expand. I will draw on the relatively early study by Paul Giles ('Sentimental Posthumanism', 2007) published before The Pale King; though unfinished, this novel necessitates a re-evaluation of Giles's argument that Wallace 'seeks to open up spaces within [...] abstract grids of information technology where human emotion and identity can be explored'. I intend to show how spaces for identity are rarely opened up in The Pale King, instead being enclosed by the advent of mechanised data processors to the extent of erasing the self: from Wallace's notes on the novel we know that the character/narrator David Wallace was intended to disappear from the narrative and simply become a 'creature of the system'. I will also re-evaluate theAlex Russell
conclusion of Conley Wouters's study on information patterns in The Pale King ('"What Am I, A Machine?"', 2012) in which he reasserts Giles's argument in light of the new novel, claiming it offers the reader a series of case studies on 'how people might become machines' in a 'cohabitational harmony between consciousness and information'.
While engaging with these texts specific to Wallace, I will also examine how Wallace handled the ideas of posthumanism as set out in some of its key texts: Donna Haraway's 'A Cyborg Manifesto' (1991) and N. Katherine Hayles's How We Became Posthuman (1999). Unlike previous studies, I intend to examine how the way in which Wallace used technology to define contemporary conceptions of selfhood was altered between the publications of Infinite Jest and The Pale King, arguing that the importance of technology's relationship to postmodernism in this definition was overridden by posthumanism and the idea of 'material objects [...] interpenetrated by information patterns' (Hayles), or as Giles writes: 'computation [...] as the ground of being'.

References

Thesis Proposal Bibliography
Primary Sources
Wallace, David Foster, 'E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction' in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (London: Abacus, 1998)
Wallace, David Foster, Infinite Jest (London: Little, Brown, 1996)
Wallace, David Foster, The Pale King (London: Penguin, 2012)
Secondary Sources
Burn, Stephen J., ed., Conversations with David Foster Wallace (Jackson: University of Mississippi, 2012)
Cahn, Steven M. & Eckert, Maureen, eds., Freedom and the Self: Essays on the Philosophy of David Foster Wallace (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015)
Giles, Paul, 'Sentimental Posthumanism: David Foster Wallace', Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 53, No. 3, (Autumn, 2007), pp. 327-344
Haraway, Donna, 'A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century' in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (Abingdon: Routledge, 1991)
Hayes-Brady, Clare, The Unspeakable Failures of David Foster Wallace: Language, Identity, and Resistance (London: Bloomsbury, 2016)
Hayles, N. Katherine, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999)
Hering, David, David Foster Wallace: Fiction and Form (London: Bloomsbury, 2016)
Hirt, Stefan, The Iron Bars of Freedom: David Foster Wallace and the Postmodern Self (New York: Ibidem Press, 2008)
Postman, Neil, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (London: Heinemann, 1986)
Wouters, Conley, '"What Am I, A Machine?": Humans, Information, and Matters of Record in David Foster Wallace's "The Pale King"', Studies in the Novel, Vol. 44, No. 4 (Winter, 2012), pp. 447-463