Mike McCormack and the Speculative Metaphysics of Fiction

This book pursues a coherent reading of Mike McCormark's fiction through the critical lens of a crisis of belonging to the world, responding to Rob Doyle's assessment that collapse and crisis of "economies, infrastructures, the human body, the very machinery of the stars and galaxies" constitute the very conditions of contemporary worldhood and the structural determinants of conscious thought in McCormack's fiction. The very first to examine McCormack's literary output as a whole, this book explores how his challenging, genre-bending fiction employs novelistic strategies of defamiliarization to probe the limits of contemporary belonging-in-the-world, particularized through characters denuded of physical well-being and political participation within a polity which has become uprooted from historical continuity. McCormack's uncanny landscapes and alienated communities show up the poverty of postmodern selfhood while allowing artistic language to forge new intellectual means, bringing to bear intense novelistic reflections on threshold conditions that ironically hold out the promise of an ambiguous regeneration, innovative ways of belonging to a posthuman future that destabilizes the image of the globalized present.

Ian Tan is Assistant Professor of English Literature at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, and Associate Editor of The Wallace Stevens Journal. He is the author of Wallace Stevens and Martin Heidegger: Poetry as Appropriative Proximity, Wallace Stevens and the Contemporary Irish Novel: Form, Order, and Creative Un-Doing and Understanding Barbara Kingsolver, and editor of Wallace Stevens in Theory.