While Wallace’s fiction is famously “about what it means to be a fucking human being,” there is a consistent strain of posthumanism in his writing that has formed a rich thread of scholarship, from Hayles’ technological lens and Giles’ sentimental reading through to Hayes-Brady’s consideration of the body as object, Hering’s examination of the self as a spatial nexus and Vermeule’s Schopenhauerian reading of mind/body dualism. Indeed, it is difficult to encounter Wallace at all without a consideration of the post-ness of his humanism. At the heart of this posthumanism is an ambivalence about the locus of the self in a deeply networked yet alienating world, where telephones and roads are as much a barrier to communion as they are conducive. Beginning with the most disembodied characters – Wallace’s many ghosts – the chapter draws attention to the ways in which the disembodied self in Wallace’s work – pure consciousness – is limited and impotent. The chapter also examines the representation of the most deeply embodied characters – babies – as the other side of this coin, incoherent and narcissistic. Engaging philosophies of dualism and embodiment as well as drawing on the more recent neuroscientific turn in literary studies, this chapter argues that consciousness for Wallace involves imagining the mind in and of the body. This chapter connects this section with the following one, reminding us that for Wallace the self exists always and only within the world.

The topic considered in Chapter 3 is an epic strain in the Tour, following the model first suggested by E.M.W. Tillyard. It attempts to show how the work fulfils the requirements of the genre, as defined by Tillyard, which include high seriousness, amplitude, a predetermined organization, and a choric quality, through which the author is able to “express the feelings of a large group of people living in or near his own time.” The chapter identifies a number of features in the Tour that mimic epic properties, among them the opening statement of a running theme; the motif of a journey comparable in particular ways to a heroic quest; a descent into the underworld; catalogues of past deeds; episodes which the traveler encounters natural winders; discussion of local myths; and the use of sententiae. It is argued that the nation becomes the hero of a narrative designed to aggrandise the future glories of Britain.

Percy’s classic novel grapples self-consciously with the complexities of its relation to a sense of place and its setting in mid-twentieth-century New Orleans. Percy himself was ambivalent about New Orleans, just as the protagonist of his novel is, and chose to live on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain to avoid the distractions of the city, and his deliberate dislocation vis-à-vis the famous city undergirds his deeply philosophic inquiry into the meaning of place, an inquiry tha, for the main character in the novel is tied to the posttraumatic stress disorder that followed his wounding in the Korean War.