In my Master’s Thesis, I am exploring the role of body language and nonverbal communication in David Foster Wallace’s short story collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999). The collection has been seen as a very typical work for Wallace, showcasing his usual themes and techniques, but so far it has not been studied as much as his novels. The subjects of the stories in this collection mostly revolve around relationships between men and women, language, sexuality and communication.

David Foster Wallace’s works have often been analyzed in relation to the tradition of postmodern literature and his struggle to break free from this tradition. To help understand this discussion, I begin this study by discussing features of postmodern and post-postmodern literature. Of special interest is post-postmodern literature’s tendency to want to escape from the postmodern focus on discourse to something real. After the literary context, I discuss body studies and the possibility of seeing body as something real that text could escape to. In addition to discussing general body theory, I present central issues in discussing nonverbal communication in literature.

I analyze body language in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men from four different viewpoints. First, I discuss short stories where it is used in a self-conscious way to lie or manipulate. After this, I concentrate on cases where body language is ambiguous or hard to decode. As my third viewpoint, I analyze stories where body language is seen as a more truthful mode of communication than verbal communication, mainly focusing on involuntary gestures and facial expressions, also known as nonverbal leakage. Finally, I discuss body language as an enabler of sincere communication.

My study shows that David Foster Wallace uses body language in his stories in a variety of ways. On the one hand, it is aligned with his criticism of postmodernism when it is used insincerely. At the same time, to some extent it cannot be controlled, and it can disrupt social order and challenge the will of self-conscious subjects. Most importantly, the embodied existence that unites people can also enable sincere and empathetic communication via body language.