View all notes
[...] in a late interview about the philosophical preoccupations of his work, Wallace responded: if some people read my fiction and see it as fundamentally about philosophical ideas, what it probably means is that these are pieces where the characters are not as alive and interesting as I meant them to be," echoing Wittgenstein, who argued that philosophy should involve more than abstract phenomena, asking: "what is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., & if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life." [...] In other words, the end of philosophy, for Wittgenstein, is not simply the pursuit of academic study, but the better ability to live in and consider the world. [...]
[...] The Vlad scenario also highlights what Rorty would regard as the misguided tendency to seek extrinsic (in this case divine) meaning in things that manifestly lack intentional significance [...]
In view of what Rortv sees as the incommensurability of different vocabularies, he is forced to view truth and knowledge as constructs of whatever vocabulary is seeking them (almost always collective rather than individual). A corollary of this view, however, is that each vocabulary phrases its own inescapable problems. This is a view Rorty clarifies in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, where he discusses the nature of truth as a property of statements, not of facts; for example, the color of an object is not true or false, but the statement that such an object is blue has the property of truth or falsehood. He argues further that language is made, not discovered, and as such, truth is a creation, not an extrinsic reality: "since truth is a property of sentences, since sentences are dependent for their existence on vocabularies and since vocabularies are made by human beings, so are truths:*
Boswell referred to Broom as "first and foremost a work of metafiction," but I do not fully agree. While the "direct and immediate concern with fiction-making itself" that characterizes the metafictionist, is undeniably present in Broom, it is superseded by a much more pressing concern: how to actually live in a linguistically unstable world, the same concern Wallace observed in Wittgenstein's Mistress. Broom offers a structural meditation on exactly that instability, forcing he novel's form to replicate the linguistic labyrinth of its characters; the novel explores, and indeed exploits, the conventions of metafiction, but does not allow the work to be overwhelmed by its metafictionality. Rather, Broom is more a work that interrogates metafiction by means of its own devices, and finds it wanting. [...]
in Understanding p31
so it's like meta-metafiction lol
[...] In Oneself as Another, the published version of his Gifford Lectures, Ricoeur posits the existence of two separate and opposing strands of individual identity, the idem and the ipse. In Ricoeur's conception of the self, "the narrative constructs the identity of the character"; we use stories about ourselves to make sense of the world and our place in it.
ipse (who one is) is selfhood; idem is sameness, what the self consists of? apparently Infinite Jest specifically mentions the annual Gifford Lecture series, which may be a reference to Ricoeur
Randall [...] has an elevated opinion of his own intellectual standing. [...] unnecessary Latin phrases, italicization, and the use of exaggerated inverted commas as a sort of conversational crutch, ostensibly indicating his disdain for contemporary argot, but actually revealing a narrator uncomfortable with his own voice, a discomfort that proves crucial once the sub-narrative is revealed at the close to the story. The uneasy edge to the voice keeps the reader alert [...]
also mentions the use of referral to Hope's father as "Father" & how it undermines the narrative voice (foreshadows when it's revealed that it's Hope's dream)
[...] the narrator despises this girl's lifestyle and outlook, yet finds himself almost obsessively in need of her approval and love. As a consequence, he attempts to master her, to prove his own superiority, in much the same way as Wallace described the tendency he saw in his own and others' work to challenge the reader with long sentences, too much data or the intentional frustration of expectations. When that does not work, and the narrator realizes that the power balance in the story has shifted to the girl, he loses his control over language altogether, transferring his rage to the other mute female character in an incoherent tirade. The transference of anger in the final paragraph demonstrates the effect of a total loss of power on the linguistic control of the narrator, offering a clear psychological link between linguistic dominance and other forms of power.
never thought of it that way ... im also starting to realise i missed quite a bit from that story
[...] Wallace distances himself falely from a group in order to establish a relationship wtih the reader. This tactic is more complex--and often less successful--in the scholarly writing, because, as shown here, Wallace frequently is an expert in what he writes about. With that in min, such distancing seems outright mendacious. By linguistically encoding the opposition that may or may not exist between him as author/narrator and the implicit "them"--in this case critics and theoreticians--Wallace attempts to solidify his alliance with the reader. However, the disjunction between this alliance and the tone and content of the essay's substantive portions serves to underscore Wallace's disingenuous construction, thus perhaps putting the reader even more on guard.
De la Durantaye articulates Wallace's vision as follows: "freedom is not about having as few fetters as possible; it is about leading an examined life. Freedom is about being a good person, choosing to be a good person, every day."
"How to Be Happy" by Leland De la Durantaye in the Boston Review March 2011
If you dedicate your existence to being likable, however, and if you adopt whatever cool persona is necessary to make it happen, it suggests that you've despaired of being loved for who you really are. And if you succeed in manipulating other people into liking you, it will be hard not to feel, at some level contempt for these people, because they've fallen for your shtick. Those people exist to make you feel good about yourself, but how good can your feeling be when it's provided by people you don't respect? [...]