Activity

this tension between veneration and excoriation, often expressed in the same breath, a kind of schizoaffective critical articulation, is a dominant motif in his engagement with recent cultural shifts

he invoked Updike's craftsmanship as the epitome of ars gratia artis, while also suggesting that Updike "had never had an unpublished thought."

his frames of reference zigzag wildly from bathos to profundity

on the one hand, it marks him out as what he believes himself to be, pinning him to the White American Male paradigm, while on the other hand, it actively and repeatedly repudiates that label, invoking a kind of paralliptical self-negation

Wallace's etiology of his own biased perspective is neither cure nor excuse for its intransitiveness