fictions present

Chaired by Rone Shavers, transcribed by Marie Fahd, and joined by Jeff Jackson and Jacob Singer, this roundtable and discussion took place at the Gaddis Centenary Conference in St Louis, on October 22nd 2022. It has been lightly edited and expanded.

In his review of Thomas Travers' book "Peripheralizing DeLillo", Conte explores the thematic undercurrents of capitalism and its discontents across Don DeLillo's oeuvre.

Benjamin Bergholz provides a detailed description of the neoliberal hellscape prophesized in J R. Bergholz identifies a dialectical relationship between our necessary failure as readers to fully comprehend the full details of J R's world, and the historical developments—mainly, the "end of history"—that drive this failure. He asks, how might Gaddis’s decision to impair the reader’s "ability to see what is happening" in the world of his novel help us better engage with "what is happening" in the world outside of it?

Traces of Vaihinger appear in Gaddis’s first novel, The Recognitions. But what of the rest of his corpus? John Soutter explores Vaihinger's influence on Gaddis.

We asked our contributors a set of simple questions: what do you think Gaddis Studies has best covered already, what do you think are its prospects for the future, and what future avenues would you like to see explored?