Activity

[...] 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 ge…

[...] 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 repres…

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 mo…

[...] I believe that "Westward"'s fictional project should instead be read as, if not as accomplishing, then at least pointing toward a relationship to irony that is anti-eschatological, that acknowledges irony's fundamental "temporality that is not organic," and that it "allows for no end, for no …

He means that the "backyard-barbecue and three-martini" mother lode of American realism mined by an earlier generation of writers--writers from Updike country--simpy fails to connect with him, either as writer or reader.

Rather, Wallace is a descendant of that subversive, anarchic branch of Amer…