Saturday, September 09, 2006

David Foster Wallace

Just read his piece on tennis in the NYT. Amazing writer, but infuriating too as he makes half his points in huge footnotes. Am most interested in his views on irony. See the Wikipedia treatment below:

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Wallace's fiction is often concerned with what he considers the prevalent contemporary mode of irony, which he believes hinders and complicates authentic communication in fiction and culture as a whole. His essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction," originally published in the small-circulation Review of Contemporary Fiction in 1993, pointed out the often corrosively ironic effect of television's influence on fiction writing, and urged literary authors to avoid irony's many pitfalls. Wallace himself does use many different forms of irony in his work but he also focuses on individuals' continued longing for earnest unselfconscious experience and communication in a deeply self-conscious, cynical, media-saturated society.

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