Reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest in the tradition of Joyce’s Ulysses, this chapter argues that Infinite Jest reinterprets Joyce’s use of a secular trinity, a model of community through the recognition of a shared human substance, by means of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Joyce’s trinity is thus transformed into a collaboration of author, reader, and text in the production of meaning, the novel thereby proposing a literary public language game as an alternative to solipsizing, endless deconstruction. This ghostly return of the dead author as dialogic, effaced yet present, allows for sincere communication between author and reader without recourse to a form of biographical reading reprimanded by post-structuralist philosophers. Philosophy and literature cross-fertilizing each other, Infinite Jest picks up narrative strategies of Ulysses and philosophically examines and literarily modifies them through ordinary language philosophy in order to make them applicable to the postmodern solipsism the novel perceives as its general human condition.

The early chapters of the present study consider how Nietzsche’s ideas bore on the reconceptualisation of the role of the Irish artist and the development of new forms of Irish writing during the first decade of the twentieth century. Chapter 1 examines Shaw in the guise of a self-styled ‘artist-philosopher’, who sought to provoke his London audience – so concerned with profit making, social class, and late Victorian respectability – into recognising its own short-sightedness, as he worked to remake the national conscience of both England and Ireland. In doing so, the chapter provides the first comprehensive reading of Shaw’s Man and Superman (1903) in terms of Nietzsche’s philosophy. Capitalising on the philosopher’s growing reputation, and appropriating his most infamous creation, the Übermensch, Shaw’s text develops a sprawling, contradictory, dialectical new form of drama in order to promote something that Nietzsche’s oeuvre did not offer: a coherent political philosophy. Like his German counterpart, the Irish playwright pursued a position both within and without traditional philosophical discourse and its field of cultural production, where he could enjoy both the benefits of membership and the returns on transgression. His first ‘drama of ideas’ mingled Nietzschean philosophy, Fabian socialism, and Lamarckian evolutionary theory, along with a parodic comedy of manners, a surreal tableau called ‘Don Juan in Hell’, and an appended ‘Revolutionist’s Handbook’, which collectively strain against the traditional form of the well-made play and shatter the rhetorical conventions of philosophical discourse. But this new ‘modernist’ form of drama nonetheless served to advance a Shavian vision of human enhancement and political transformation. A real revolution, whether in England or Ireland, would only be brought about by changing the ‘raw material’ of the citizenry – the physiological basis of their moral sensibility and collective conscience – in order to raise the national community to heights previously associated with the singular Übermensch. The title of Shaw’s play linked his own reputation to the reception of Nietzsche’s writing, and also allowed critics to write off his ‘drama of ideas’ as recycled German philosophy, though the play itself ultimately offered a type of political philosophy – and worrying propaganda – like nothing before seen on the page or stage in England or Ireland.

This chapter examines the place of uselessness in the history of queer representation by looking back to the moment of fin-de-siècle aestheticism. Whilst usefulness has been associated rhetorically with difference (legible most clearly in the idiomatic rendering of usefulness as 'making a difference'), this chapter explores how queers have been associated with sameness in the form of a perceived ineffectiveness that, rather than making a difference, tends to leave things the same. In particular, it addresses two aesthete protagonists from the novels of Henry James: Rowland Mallet in Roderick Hudson (1875) and Gabriel Nash in The Tragic Muse (1890). The chapter argues that the particular brand of aestheticism they embody (more attached to 'theory' than anything else) throws into relief some of the commitments of contemporary scholarship that has focused on queer failure and backwardness. Situated in a history in which queer theory itself has been subject to charges of uselessness from scholars apparently better attuned to the materialities of lived experience, Rowland and Gabriel serve to flag up a longer history of intimate connection between queers and uselessness.

This chapter questions the suggestion that has already been made of a spiritual convergence between George Herbert and St. François de Sales. The elimination of turbulence and urgency from the inner life certainly was a goal for St. François, but it was certainly not consistently or predominantly so for the George Herbert of the lyrics. But what of the “sweetness” connection? They both saw the religious life as providing pleasure, including in the Eucharist, or Holy Communion. But this does not mean that their Eucharistic theologies were identical, a consideration that must enter the comparison. There is a great deal more “affliction” in the religious life as Herbert presents it than as St. François does – which almost certainly derives from “doctrine,” from differing theological pictures of the postlapsarian human self. St. François, following the Catholic and especially Teresian mystical tradition, does not want to distinguish sharply between physical and spiritual “sweetness.” Herbert is clear on the distinction, though willing to use the analogy. Herbert’s deliberately contentious view and poetry contrasts with the staidness of much of what he reacted against in continental thinking. Close analysis of these texts indicates that, contrary to much recent criticism, doctrine matters, shaping the tenor and substance of life.

This chapter considers David Foster Wallace’s relationship to issues and images of performance by examining his frequent writing about technologically unmediated live theatre, often moments evocative of the Platonic dialogues, their theatrical elements, and the interplay of Socrates and the Sophists. On the basis of such Wallace scenes and Martin Puchner’s theories of philosophical theatre, the chapter argues that being a philosopher for Wallace is an art frequently, if not always, tied to performances of a certain exacting and humbling kind. The readings are grounded in moments from across Wallace’s oeuvre (though concentrated in Brief Interviews, with some attention paid as well to Infinite Jest and The Pale King) that occupy one or both of two major domains: first, expertly crafted scenes of dialogue that mark a twist on the Platonic dialogues and their dramatic staging of philosophical conflict, particularly when it involves the sophistry Wallace found dominating postmodernity; and second, moments that conjure not just performance but a particularly abject stage performer, showing that Wallace, while seeing no ultimate escape from the artifices of performance, would at crucial moments strategically strip performers down to a state of naked vulnerability. In crucial moments of powerful idea-making where he relies on theatrical metaphors, opposes live stage performance to the kind that TV and film offer, and plays with definitions of the performer to unseat an ensconced idea, Wallace is, this chapter argues, a philosopher-dramatist.

This chapter examines unexplored parallels between three French Protestant poets and George Herbert, noting signs of shared rhetorical and spiritual strategies of internal struggle. John Donne’s Sonnet XIV, “Batter my heart, three person’d God,” bears clear resemblances to Grévin’s third sonnet in the second part of the Gélodacrye. George Herbert, too, may have been influenced by some of Grévin’s sonnets, particularly when one considers the common coteries within which the Herberts and Donne moved. Close parallels in language and syntax between Herbert’s poems and poems by popular French Protestant poets of the time strongly imply influence. In all four poets, lively and contentious forms of communion are predicated on the radical inequality between the poet and God, answered by an adoptive call and look designed to transform and transport the poet and reader. Close parallels of insistent repetition, vehementia, and ternary correspondence are among the rhetorical similarities explored in detail.

This essay focuses on fathers and sons in the mid-seventeenth century, when the division between Catholic and Protestant was further complicated by the emergence of new sects and denominations. Religious tensions and conflict between parents and adolescent or young adult children could become a significant element in family life, one that remains relatively neglected in modern scholarship. This essay explores how such children attempted to reconcile duty to parents with the devotion they owed God, in struggles recorded in their diaries and autobiographies.

This chapter looks at foreign productions of Antony and Cleopatra played on stages in the UK and abroad, in English and in translation: Peter Zadek’s Berliner Ensemble production in a specially commissioned German translation at the Edinburgh Festival; Toneelgroep Amsterdam’s modern Dutch, modern-dress, high-tech production in Amsterdam; and in Washington DC and in Stratford, Ontario, productions in English that nevertheless saw Shakespeare with foreign eyes. In every case, this chapter discovers the ‘foreign’ to be a problematic concept, as demonstrated first with the production that sets up the subsequent discussion, Theodore Komisarjevsky’s Antony and Cleopatra at the New Theatre (London) in 1936.

Comparing Herbert’s inspiration and focus in The Country Parson with that of John Calvin’s Commentaries to the Pastoral Epistles makes Herbert’s purposes, concerns, and focus clearer. He is concerned with far more than mere outward marks of religious devotion. The pastor’s construction of an outward and visible manifestation of inward states for the edification of others need not be disingenuous or insincere. The pastor struggles in communion with God in order to avoid the contempt, and cultivate the faith, of others. It is only by linking George Herbert’s writing to continental thought and theology that we can fully understand his pastoral prospects for a comprehensive Church that sustains the needs of all its members (regardless of their social belonging) at a local level as well as universally.

This essay examines how early modern prisons in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries could sometimes serve as sacred spaces. Through an engagement with elite and popular texts, this research draws the frequent connection between profane incarceration and the consecration of space achieved by an individual’s pious actions: self-examination, religious conversation, praying, reading and writing. It further posits that prison texts themselves, that recorded these devotions, might have been read more than other traditional Protestant works, thus propelling godliness across thresholds: from the prison into the booksellers, and finally into the home.