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Across these reviews, Wallace consistently prosecutes his own emerging aesthetic project. He engages largely with experimental and postmodern texts that, in one way or another, lose the plot, become too self-involved, too inward-looking. As his review of Acker suggests, there are certain literary a…

Of course, in many ordinary cases of professionalization, becoming more specialized wouldn't seem to be that much of a problem, spiritual or otherwise. Sure, you can't write a compelling memoir, but you'll have a prodigious near-miraculous backhand. In the case of the fiction-writer, however, becom…

In laying out this argument, Guillory draws on the famous portrait of the scholar that Friedrich Nietzsche evokes in The Gay Science:

In a scholar's book [Nietzsche writes] there is nearly always something oppressive, oppressed: the "specialist" emerges somehow-his eagerness, his seriousness, …

Creative writing, at least as Wallace saw it in the late 1980s, is no oasis from the perils of professionalization. On Wallace's account, the literary professional seems fated to suffer from what Guillory wants to call a "déformation professionnelle" by virtue of being a professional in the first p…

In a recent article, Tim Yu gives a good overview of Wallace's
"deeply ambivalent" relationship to professionalization and the pro-fessionalization of creative writing!' As Yu notes, Wallace's writing repeatedly features top professionals and professional-like figures who specialize in incredibly …