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The second example is footnote 119, a brief comment on the clause "guys in the Guy division have to slide out on a plastic telephone pole slathered with Vaseline (336-7). The footnote inserts a laconic "(the pole)", which combines rhetorical distance with a boundless "drive for disambiguation" to m…

In a pithy formulation, Steven Connor has quipped that "[b]eing modernist always meant not quite realizing that you were so," whereas "[b]eing postmodernist always involved the awareness that you were so" [...] I would suggest, being a "post-postmodernist" of Wallace's generation means never quite …

[...] Wallace, who recognized that Derrida had "successfully debunked the idea that speech is language's primary instantiation" (Lobster 84), agreed that the effect advertising had of highlighting the complexity and impurity of all discourse could only be responded to by acknowledging one's own imp…

[...] sincerity as a concept has from the beginning been wracked by this kind of difficutly, has never, in fact, evaded its theatrical connection to a notion of performance. "In a traditional sense," van Alphen and Bal tell us, "sincerity indicates the performance of an inner state on one's outer s…

[...] he birthing of postmodernity in late capitalism, the central argument of Jameson's theory, is clearly suggested here. He argues that postmodern suspicion of all cultural truth as mere elaborations of ideology makes it a perfect partner for capitalism (Postmodernism xxi), and in making Colli…