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Unlike Pynchon, however, Wallace does not wish to dump the legacy of Calvinism; he seeks to build fictions around work and the fervent call to work, an activity he recurrently sees not just in terms of the labor theory of value but, through the lens of Hegel, as the only way of creating a fully via…

[...] Wallace also argues that literary texts are ideally engaged with proving existence: Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress should have been titled "I EXIST", which Wallace says is the "signal that throbs under most voluntary writing--& all good writing" [...]

The balance scale, I argue, was the image to which he kept returning for reconciliation of his varied ambitions, beginning from his naming of his first protagonist--an LB--after a standard unit of weight, money, and work (from the Latin libra, balance) and continuing through his romancing of IRS …

I remember hearing a fellow talking about the Nazi doctors on the radio. He described these people as monsters, subhuman. It's true, of course, that we human beings have done monstrous things. But none of is anything other than human. Indeed, it's because we're human that we are capable of such mo…

In many ways, we create a bigger problem when we put people on a pedestal in our speech than when we cut them down. Whenever we make anyone--a minister, a teacher, an athlete, a genius, our ancestors, the Buddha--bigger than life, it's easy for both you and your listener to forget that the person y…