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David Foster Walrus

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Writing to please or writing to persuade?

By Matt Pearce

“Where the craving for admiration and approval predominates, intellectual rigor cannot thrive, if it survives at all.”

So spake Maud Newton in the New York Times Magazine this weekend, launching an attack against deceased literary folk-superhero David Foster Wallace for his audience-conscious “aw-shucks, I-could-be-wrong-here, I’m-just-a-supersincere-regular-guy-who-happens-to-have-written-a-book-on-infinity approach” to nonfiction. Her essay is the most nuanced and uncurmudgeonly critique I’ve seen of Wallace, who seems as to be much of an untouchable as you can get in the literary world. She harpoons Wallace’s stylistic affectations, some of which have migrated their way into broader audience; she then pivots to attack the blogosphere’s worst habits of fake folksiness and argumentative gutlessness, which she thinks have descended from Wallace and undermined our ability to argue. “(T)he idea is to provoke and persuade, not to soothe,” Newton concludes. “And the best way to make an argument is to make it, straightforwardly, honestly, passionately, without regard to whether people will like you afterward.”

Here’s an argument: There are worse things than pleasing your audience, even if you have to click your heels every now and then to do it. Bill O’Reilly is straightforward, passionate, provocative, and doesn’t give a damn what you think. He also boasts a jacket of priors on Politifact, and his style makes across-the-aisle alienation a foregone conclusion. But he’s hardly alone; when it comes to “provoke and persuade,” Fox News already leads the way, leaving a trail of scorched earth behind it. Was Wallace really so bad? Shouldn’t we promote more self-doubt, not less?

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(Source: thenewinquiry)

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Link 265
Notes The Uncollected Essays

tetw:

By David Foster Wallace

The ultimate David Foster Wallace resource. A complete list of his uncollected fiction and essays (links to everything that’s online).

The site also hosts a full list of published essays from his books (also has links where available).

This is going to sweep through Tumblr like a summer storm.

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#DFW #David foster Wallace #The Onion

Quote 559
Notes

"We all have our little solipsistic delusions, ghastly intuitions of utter similarity: that we are the only one in the house who ever fills the ice-cube tray, who unloads the clean dishwasher, who occasionally pees in the shower, whose eyelid twitches on first dates; that only we take casualness terribly seriously; that only we hear the whiny pathos in a dog’s yawn, the timeless sigh in the opening of the hermetically-sealed jar, the splattered laugh in the frying egg, the minor-D lament in the vacuum’s scream; that only we feel the panic at sunset the rookie kindergartner feels at his mother’s retreat. That only we love the only-we. Solipsism binds us together, J.D. knows. That we feel lonely in a crowd; stop not to dwell on what’s brought the crowd into being. That we are, always, faces in a crowd."

Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way, David Foster Wallace (via ourcatastrophe)

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#Existentialism Reblog. #Excerpts. #David Foster Wallace