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Ordinary Unhappiness: The Therapeutic Fiction of David Foster Wallace New edition [Pehme köide]

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This book approaches David Foster Wallace not only as a fiction writer but also as a cultural critic and a moral philosopher whose formal innovations were intended as "therapies" for the pervasive dis-eases of our time.

In recent years, the American fiction writer David Foster Wallace has been treated as a symbol, as an icon, and even a film character. Ordinary Unhappiness returns us to the reason we all know about him in the first place: his fiction. By closely examining Infinite Jest, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and The Pale King, Jon Baskin points readers to the work at the center of Wallace's oeuvre and places that writing in conversation with a philosophical tradition that includes Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard, and Cavell, among others. What emerges is a Wallace who not only speaks to our postmodern addictions in the age of mass entertainment and McDonald's but who seeks to address a quiet desperation at the heart of our modern lives. Freud said that the job of the therapeutic process was to turn "hysterical misery into ordinary unhappiness." This book makes a case for how Wallace achieved this in his fiction.

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"This is an original, fearless reading of Wallace that I wouldn't hesitate to recommend to my students. Even if they disagreed with it, it would get them thinkingand I bet they'd learn something, as I did. Baskin's readings are persuasive, bold, enterprising, and unafraid of disrupting conventional academic hermeneutics. We need books like this."James Wood, Harvard University "Since his death a decade ago, a lot of smart writing on David Foster Wallace has appeared in print. This insightful new book is among the smartest. Ordinary Unhappiness is a luminous model of how philosophers and literary critics might together help us see ourselves and our situation more clearly."Lee Konstantinou, University of Maryland, College Park "Baskin's book isrelevant and insightful to all readers of Wallace, both literary critics and laypeople, but the book is also relevant for students of philosophy with an interest in philosophical or literary therapy as something other than psychological therapy. I highly recommend this book."Finn Janning, Metapsychology

Foreword vii
Paul A. Kottman
Abbreviations xi
Introduction: Habits of Mind 1(22)
1 Narrative Morality
On Philosophically Therapeutic Criticism
23(16)
2 Playing Games
Infinite Jest as Philosophical Therapy
39(42)
3 So Decide
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men as Philosophical Criticism
81(32)
4 Untrendy Problems
The Pale King's Philosophical Inspirations
113(20)
Conclusion: In Heaven and Earth 133(6)
Acknowledgments 139(2)
Notes 141(20)
Bibliography 161(8)
Index 169
Jon Baskin is the Associate Director of the Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism program at the New School for Social Research and a founding editor of The Point.