Wayne State University Wayne State University Dissertations 1-1-2016 Novelistic Intimacies: Reading And Writing In The Late Age Of Print Vincent Michael Haddad Wayne State University, Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/oa_dissertations Part of the American Literature Commons, Esthetics Commons, and the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons Recommended Citation Haddad, Vincent Michael, "Novelistic Intimacies: Reading And Writing In The Late Age Of Print" (2016). Wayne State University Dissertations. 1638. https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/oa_dissertations/1638 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@WayneState. It has been accepted for inclusion in Wayne State University Dissertations by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@WayneState. NOVELISTIC INTIMACIES: READING AND WRITING IN THE LATE AGE OF PRINT, 1996-PRESENT by VINCENT HADDAD DISSERTATION Submitted to the Graduate School of Wayne State University Detroit, Michigan in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY 2016 MAJOR: ENGLISH Approved By: _________________________________________ Advisor Date _________________________________________ _________________________________________ _________________________________________ ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Now at the final steps of this project, I am not entirely sure how it all happened. What I am sure of is that none of this would have come together without the care, brilliance, and patience of renée c. hoogland, Lisa Maruca, Jonathan Flatley, and Andrew Hoberek. I would also like to thank Barrett Watten and Lara Langer Cohen, whose teaching and creativity of thought have doubtlessly been impressed on this work, and Caroline Maun, whose advice and guidance have been so vital to my career as a graduate student. In particular, I would like to thank renée hoogland for teaching me the deep importance of language. She also made possible and organized graduate trips to Berlin and Amsterdam, which have had an incalculable effect on broadening my thinking on literature and culture. Without the support of the Department of English at Wayne State University, who awarded me an archival research grant, and the dedicated archivists at the Harry Ransom Center, my chapter on the works of David Foster Wallace would not be what it is. I am also very grateful to the Humanities Center, whose Doctoral Dissertation Award put food on my table for my final semester. I would like to thank the editors at the peer-reviewed literary journals Orbit: Writing Around Pynchon and ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies, who have advised me on key edits, in Chapters One and Three respectively, and shared my work with their audiences. I would also like to thank my parents, who did not lock me away when I decided not to become a pharmacist, my late grandpa, who always reminded me of what hard work meant in the 1930s, and my siblings Manny and Nicole, who have always supported me unconditionally. Finally, I would like to thank Melanie Zynel. You have read my worst drafts and still made me feel like the smartest person in the world. Your brilliance and skepticism have inspired me. With love, Vincent Haddad ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS..............................................................................................................................ii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS........................................................................................................................ iv INTRODUCTION: “TRY TO BECOME HIM”: INTIMACY IN CONTEMPORARY FICTION.......................... 1 CHAPTER 1: CONJURING DAVID FOSTER WALLACE’S GHOST: PROSOPOPOEIA, WHITMANIAN INTIMACY AND THE QUEER POTENTIAL OF INFINITE JEST AND THE PALE KING......................... 20 CHAPTER 2: BECOMING-PERVERT: ORIENTATING ONESELF IN A.M. HOMES’S THE END OF ALICE.................................................................................................................................................... 52 CHAPTER 3: CHRIS WARE’S BUILDING STORIES AS DELEUZIAN FABULATION, OR HOW AND WHY TO READ GRAPHIC NARRATIVES AFFECTIVELY................................................................................... 96 CHAPTER 4: BLACK LOVE AND LIBERATION IN THE SHADOW OF DU BOIS: KIESE LAYMON’S LONG DIVISION AS AFRO-FABULATION........................................................................................................ 130 CONCLUSION: READING AND WRITING INTIMACY AND THE SELF NOW...........................................179 WORKS CITED.......................................................................................................................................182 ABSTRACT............................................................................................................................................. 195 AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL STATEMENT.......................................................................................................197 iii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS Quotations from these primary texts are from the following editions, and are cited parenthetically with the abbreviations listed below: IJ David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (New York: Back Bay Books, 2006 [1996]) TPK David Foster Wallace, The Pale King, Ed. Michael Pietsch (New York: Little, Brown, 2011) EA A.M. Homes, The End of Alice (New York: Scribner, 1996) BS Chris Ware, Building Stories (New York: Pantheon, 2012) LD Kiese Laymon, Long Division (Chicago: Bolden, 2013) iv 1 INTRODUCTION: “TRY TO BECOME HIM”: INTIMACY IN CONTEMPORARY FICTION In 1925, the British novelist and critic Virginia Woolf wrote an essay entitled “How Should One Read a Book?” for The Yale Review, later anthologized in the second series of her appropriately named essay collection The Common Reader (1935).1 Although Woolf’s title poses a question, she opens the essay by qualifying her ability to provide a universal answer: “Even if I could answer the question for myself, the answer would apply only to me and not to you.” However, her pose of reading as a personal experience heightens the contrast of her preferred term, “the common reader.” In reading, we are held in common. There is, in other words, something pre-personal about our imaginative engagement with language and storytelling. Woolf defines this further. She advises that, in order to get the “deepest and widest pleasure from what we read,” readers need to “train… exactly and powerfully, here on the very spot.” In the context of the shifting relationships between readers, language, and novels in the so-called digital age, or what Ted Striphas calls the “late age of print,” the substance of this advice is, for me, centrally important to re-consider: It is simple enough to say that since books have classes--fiction, biography, poetry--we should separate them and take from each what it is right that each should give us. Yet few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning. Do not dictate to your author; try to become him. (43, emphasis mine) In this passage, Woolf provides an image of the novel as a unique reciprocal mode between author and reader, so long as the reader “try,” or make themselves available, for the encounter. Novelists writing—as well as readers reading—“in the wake” of postmodernism appear re-committed to the historical form of the novel to serve in this capacity, as recent scholarly explanations of 1 Virginia Woolf, “How Should One Read a Book?” The Yale Review 89.1 (2001 [1925]): 41-52. 2 contemporary fiction as interested in “sincerity” or “post-irony” rightly suggest. 2 Against the apparent psychic threats of new technology on inter-subjective relationships, the post-postmodern novel could be a stabilizing force, a reciprocal mode that was durable and physical, stimulating both the mind and body. Woolf asserts that even the most basic categories and genres used heuristically produce “blurred and divided minds,” in part because they function counter-intuitively, as in the case of someone who is “asking of fiction that it shall be true.” Arguably, Woolf, whose technical and stylistic innovations are now considered a hallmark of literary Modernism, might be referring to the polemical stance of the novelist William Dean Howells, a principal flag-bearer for literary Realism, who wrote, I confess that I do not care to judge any work of the imagination without first of all applying this test to it. We must ask ourselves before we ask anything else, Is it true?—true to the motives, the impulses, the principles that shape the life of actual men and women? This truth, which necessarily includes the highest morality and the highest artistry —this truth given, the book cannot be wicked and cannot be weak; and without it all graces of style and feats of invention and cunning of construction are so many superfluities of naughtiness. It is well for the truth to have all these, and shine in them, but for falsehood they are merely meretricious, the bedizenment of the wanton; they atone for nothing, they count for nothing.3 For Howells, re-presenting “the motives, the impulses, and the principles that shape the life of actual men and women” provides the social significance of writing fiction. He emphasizes