journalism can lead to a moment of real human connection between the reader and a world that they would not otherwise know
[...] What's so terrifying about the narrator's nightmares of adult life, over and above the supernatural horrors of The Exorcist, consists in the grim fact that there can be no maternal reassurance that there exists "nothing like what you just dreamed in the real world" (106).
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…
