Wallace is equally attuned to the religious valence of the concept
[...] Ultimately, what these asides hint at is the wholly transformative power of the epiphany to come, the one that will make Jeni "a very different person," one who will presumably no longer be subject to the obsessive narcissism of the young wife, her attempts at caring for her husband only flim…
[...] Whether one choose maximalist cleverness of minimalist epiphany-mongering, the deadening result, that lack of "something real," remains the same. If truly meaningful fiction, as Wallace suggests to McCaffery, "locates and applies CPR to those elements of what's human and magical that still li…
Against epiphany's overuse in the contemporary short story landscape, as well as its logic of "personal fulfillment," I broadly suggest that in his short fiction Wallace consistently seeks to shed the epiphany of the calcification and stagnation it's come to have in short fiction, redeploying it as…
with some traditional fiction it would not be necessary to offer these prolegomenas
