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Even more importantly, Hal possesses a quality that Kierkegaard would call "hiddenness" and that most intensely identifies the aesthete. In Kierkegaard's analysis, aesthetes use self-conscious thinking in order to hide from themselves. Likewise, Hal, in hiding his marijuana smoking from his friends…

Metafiction fails because it does not invite us inside but rather makes us stand back and watch the author look at his own reflection; the reader is left outside, alone, and the one thing Mark hates more than anything in the world is "to believe he is alone. Solipsism affects him like Ambrosian m…

Having declared that language is ultimately self-referential, Barth has also affirmed that novels themselves, because they do not refer directly to a knowable reality, unavoidably refer instead to other novels. This latter idea directly informs his essay "The Literature of Exhaustion," discussed at…

Wallace weds to the perspective of Hardt and Negri a Wittgensteinian awareness that there can be no metaphor capacious enough to capture language's operations.

The denigration of work, the celebration of efficiency, and the worship of the market are all hallmarks of the ideology that has dominated the United States since the late 1970s, neoliberalism. [...] At his most political, Wallace chronicles the long-term infiltration of neoliberal ideology into th…