Staying Out of Step: Compulsiveness and Detachment in Contemporary Fiction

Nt from one's inner life, the stable presence of which has been a lynchpin in the liberal human subject and its persistent legacies. By investing in an expansive realm of materiality that includes objects, human relationships and biologically and medically defined bodies, exteriority depends on a complex objectification of one's self and life: characters identify with objects, both consumption-capital-generated and not, and are defined by illnesses objectified by medical approaches. Further, compulsive and detached exteriority diminishes the relevance of inside and outside worlds as epistemological categories of human experience and replaces them with an expanded conception of the importance of materiality, flexibly and broadly defined. Exteriority lays crucial theoretical groundwork between socially and biologically determined identity, and it positions these novels as challenging the purported nihilism of postmodernity by describing positively defined selfhoods. Exterior subjects' in.