Overview

David Foster Wallace’s Toxic Sexuality: Hideousness, Neoliberalism, Spermatics is the first full-length study of perhaps the most controversial aspect of Wallace’s work – male sexuality. Departing from biographical accounts of Wallace’s troubled relationship to sex, the book offers new and engaging close readings of this vexed topic in both his fiction and non-fiction. Wallace consistently returns to images of sexual toxicity across his career to argue that, when it comes to sex, men are immutably hideous. He makes this argument by drawing on a variety of neoliberal logics and spermatic metaphors, which in their appeal to apparently neutral economic processes and natural bodily facts, forestall the possibility that men can change. The book therefore provides a revisionist account of Wallace’s attitudes towards capitalism, as well as a critical dissection of his approach to masculinity and sexuality. In doing so, David Foster Wallace’s Toxic Sexuality shows how Wallace can be considered a neoliberal writer, whose commitment to furthering male sexual toxicity is a disturbing but undeniable part of his literary project.

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9781350117761

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Edward Jackson's emergence as a key new voice in Wallace criticism rests, in part, on both his rigorous scholarship and his clear-eyed perception of what's wrong with the critical lenses that too many readers have accepted without question. David Foster Wallace's Toxic Sexuality is an elegantly written and meticulous study that addresses challenging questions-about gender and economics-with typically lively and innovative readings. * Dr Stephen Burn, Reader in Post-1945 American Literature, University of Glasgow, UK *

Author Information

Edward Jackson holds a PhD in English from the University of Birmingham. He currently teaches literature and cultural studies as a Visiting Lecturer.

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