‘I Can Hear Schacht, You’re Right. Also the fans.’ David Foster Wallace’s Reading of Richard Schacht’s Alienation

Abstract

ABSTRACT Richard Schacht’s philosophical study entitled Alienation (1971) is one of the most interesting books in the David Foster Wallace Collection housed at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. As the dedication reveals, Wallace acquired this book shortly after the publication of his debut novel, The Broom of the System (1987), and the extensive notes on its margins show that he returned to it at various stages throughout his career, including the time when he was working on the manuscript of what would become his last work, The Pale King (2011). The problem of alienation is a prominent and recurrent theme in Wallace’s fiction, and my study of both the book’s contents and the writer’s marginalia aim to depict the complexity of Wallace’s engagement with Schacht’s Alienation and its introductory essay, Walter Kaufmann’s “The Inevitability of Alienation.” My discussion aims to show that Wallace’s philosophical influences reach beyond the thinkers that are commonly associated with him (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jean-Paul Sartre, William James, etc.), and that figures such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx and Robert Blauner have thus far been neglected, in the hope of opening Wallace scholarship to new interpretative perspectives.