Introduction

The introduction offers an initial approach to Wallace’s figuration of embodiment, while also constructing a broader theoretical construct within which to situate his corporeal anxieties. Beginning with a close reading of the final chapter of The Pale King, the introduction places the current work in the context of Wallace scholarship, before gesturing towards a definition both of the body and Wallace’s concerns with embodiment. With the aid of Judith Butler’s Bodies that Matter, reference is also made to the inherent difficulty of writing the body, an object so fluid and discursively constructed that it often evades the pen with which, ironically, the body writes itself.