Creeping Always Back: The Grotesque Body in the Work of David Foster Wallace

This dissertation considers the role of the body in the fiction of contemporary American author David Foster Wallace. I describe the ways in which the body is perceived as unruly, disgusting, and uncomfortable, ultimately calling this embodiment "grotesque." However, the body provides a uniquely tangible and vibrant experience of life, in spite of and because of its grotesquery. I study the ways in which the body interacts with the environment, politics, other bodies, and its own abstracted self. The materiality of the body illustrates these interactions in grotesquely excessive detail, making them legible to scholars and general readership alike. The various deformities, quirks, mutations, and betrayals of the especially non-normate body serves to defamiliarise lived experience itself, making every body strange.