Activity

Wallace's own struggle with John Barth's indelible influence on his own fiction, all in accordance with Harold Bloom's theory of artistic anxiety and influence, which the novella both employs and parodies.

Wallace's later, more prolix argument about pop culture's successful co-opting of postmodern self-reflexivity and irony

Though the Dirty Realists had been referencing pop culture artifacts for years, their approach was primarily in the form of semiotic shorthand.

the piece is set in a writing workshop, about which more anon

took similar umbrage in the pages of Harper's