I ordered McCaffery's Vollmann anthology because of the compliments Wallace gave Vollmann in the McCaffery interview I revisited in writing this introduction. I spent 14 months trying to understand Cahoone's 600-page anthology of modern and postmodern thought because Wallace made me want to know more about it. This is his value: he creates work for the reader that is fun and challenging, and he makes you want to research and to explore. His work is both self-conscious and other-oriented, so detailed and so clearly like a conversation he's initiating with the reader--an invitation to collaborate--that when you read his fiction, you identify with the characters so much that often it seems like you're an actor playing the roles that you're reading.

[...] challenged the tradition of thinking of the mind as a mirror of reality, extending the argument to challenge the idea that language should in some way represent the world exactly as it is, if such could be discovered. He found fault with the idea that Philosophy could seek this sort of representation at all, claiming that as Philosophy evolved, "philosophical problems appeared, disappeared, or changed shape, as a result of new assumptions or vocabularies" (Philosophy xiii). To put it simply, philosophical problems are the direct offshoot of Philosophical vocabularies. [...]

[...] this new project of realism is founded on the search for human truth and linguistic honesty, guided by the principle of communication and aware of its own necessary fallibility. It is further hoped that the writing of this generation will come to be seen not as the undirected hysteria of a generation bellowing to be heard above the noise, but rather the carefully modulated representation of world where noise has become the inescapable background, a world of what Wallace called "Total Noise" ("Deciderization" xix), in which to silence the constant hum would be to misrepresent reality. [...]

[...] as N. Katherine Hayles writes, "wilderness loses its power to authenticate our lives as soon as we try to take advantage of its redemptive potential" (375). The power of the G.O.D. is negated by its commercial foundation.

[...] Wallace's vision of postmodernity in "Westward" exhibits the same qualities that Jameson attributes to this cultural phenomenon: ahistorical, flat, directionless, and representing the end-point of a linear historical progression. Wallace also seems to agree with Jameson that this place/state-of-mind has its origin, or at least has been fuelled by, the overwhelming materialism fostered by late-stage capitalism.

[...] 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 Collision the birthplace for McDonald's, long the icon of multinational capitalism, Wallace evidently agrees with this position.

[...] 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 surface so that others can witness it. But the very distinction between inner self and outer manifestation implies a split that assaults the traditional integration that marks sincerity" [...]

[...] 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 implication within this "system of general writing." One must begin by recognizing the lack of any transcendent, absolute, Archimedean point from which to judge the authentic from the inauthentic, the sincere from the manipulative, truth from ideology, and so on.

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 being sure whether you are one, whether you have really managed to escape narcissism, solipsism, irony, and insincerity. Again, this uncertainty is structural, allowing as it does for a genuine futurity that only the reader can provide. Hence Zadie Smith, in her introduction to a recent collection of stories by Wallace and his contemporaries, is right when she claims that their texts are primarily "attempting to make something happen off the page, outside words, a curious thing for a piece of writing to want to do" (Introduction xx). It is only by invoking this future off the page that dialogue can be engaged, and that both reader and writer can be challenged by the dialogic dimension of the reader experience. This call for a two-way conversation characterizes not only Wallace's work, but all the fiction of the New Sincerity. [...]

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 maximize a humorous effect: it is the note itself that sparks the question who or what was slathered with Vaseline.