[...] "Brief Interview #28" features two male students using 90s grad-school jargon (citing Foucault and Lacan) combined with pop-culture logic (citing The Rules) to explain their "postfeminist," "postmodern" sense of women as caught in a "double bind" in which they have no access to agency, fulf…
[...] By eliminating the distance between symbols and meaning, Bruce eliminates the entire structure of signification made possible by a post-structuralist understanding of language, and enlisted by Wallace in all of his fiction. By eliminating the dependence of language on context and association,…
[...] Thus women's misandry and misanthropy become the products of misogynistic male attempts to escape the despair that is the human condition. [...]
[...] Frequently Wallace depicts that anxiety about sincerity as bound up in problems of language and communication, and often from the point of view of the author himself: how does an author convince a reader he is being authentic ("Octet"), or create a persona for himself that seems real to the r…