What has yet to emerge is a holistic treatment of Wallace and cognition, which would proceed along three general lines of inquiry: (1) honoring Wallace’s innovative ways of representing the workings of human minds in his fictions; (2) exploring his role as a cognitive thinker via form, whose fiction performs feats of complex cognition uniquely reflective of our late-modern historical moment; and (3) regarding cognition through the readerly experience of Wallace’s notoriously challenging narratives as an extraordinary cognitive experience in itself, one worthy of scholarly attention.

This panel—made up of three Wallace scholars of diverse ranks, locations, and affiliations—models just such a holistic treatment of “cognitive Wallace.” Aili Pettersson Peeker considers Wallace’s narration of what cognitive scientists call “the Default Mode Network” (“DMN”), an anatomically identified brain system active when we aren’t focused on a specific external task but rather engaged in internal tasks such as personal memory or future thinking. Pettersson Peeker claims that a crucial but underexplored aspect of Wallace’s style is his distinct narrative treatment of the DMN, which couples it frequently with narration of tasks which (according to brain imaging studies) decrease activity in the DMN—specifically physical, tedious tasks that move subjects beyond what he calls “normal consciousness” (e.g. repetitively practicing your tennis stroke). Placing Wallace’s fiction in conversation with cognitive neuroscience, Pettersson Peeker suggests that Wallace’s depiction of the fluctuations of the DMN can help us better understand the phenomenology of this cognitive mode.

Yonina Hoffman considers Wallace’s approach to narrative as cognition (and vice versa) via his documented interest in complex systems. Wallace’s narrative innovations in Infinite Jest and Oblivion exemplify the systems dynamics—especially nonlinear feedback loops, in both story and discourse—fundamental to the structures of cognition and narrative. Disputing Richard Walsh’s recent anti-systems claims about narrative cognition, Hoffman argues that Wallace’s fiction (1) exposes the recursivity of all narrative cognition, which necessarily moves both backwards, forwards, and sideways in time, and (2) in so doing creates a particularly 21st-century model of cognition as multiple, self-simultaneous, self-altering, and thus nonlinear. Hoffman thus advances our understanding of Wallace’s cognitive form as well as the nonlinear systems logic underlying narrative processing.

Closing out the panel, Christopher White’s paper shifts attention to the readerly cognition and attunement Wallace’s fiction affords. Informed by recent work in “second-generation” cognitive narrative theory and predictive-processing accounts of reading, White’s paper focuses on the cognitive-readerly drama of Wallace’s difficult, late-era story “Oblivion.” The story abounds in Wallaceian digressions, narrative disruptions, and labyrinthine syntax, through which readers are presented with a radically disorienting storyworld where the lines dividing reality, fantasy, memory, and dream are unclear, and character identities are profoundly unstable. White connects the story’s cognitive themes (dreaming, hallucination, unstable identities) to the phenomenology of reading, including experiences of immersion, joint attention, and predictive plot configuration. Ultimately, White reads “Oblivion” as a provocative case study in fiction-extended cognition and fiction-enabled immersion—particularly in terms of how these activities foster unique experiences of attunement and shared agency, even while potentially entailing profound dissonances.

Our panel is structured to provoke broader conversation about Wallace and the twenty-first century mind—benefitting both Wallace Studies and cognitive literary studies more broadly. Our single-author focus rests on the premise that advancement in cognitive literary studies will require not only theory-driven studies with necessarily wider textual applications, but also sustained cognitive studies of individual authors. Game-changing cognitivist monographs on Shakespeare, Kafka, Joyce, and Beckett have been essential, but don’t reflect 21st-century ideas about cognition as they impacted authorial practice. We’ll need more of this scholarship, particularly if we are to learn from what our most innovative writers can teach us about human cognition and the exceptional form of thinking made possible through our engagements with literary fiction.