Morgan Meis of Drexel University's "The Smart Set" offers an eloquent defense of David Foster Wallace and his critique of irony:
He [Wallace] watched his literary forefathers, writers like Pynchon and Gaddis, get caught up in the game of ironic distancing that itself had already been mastered by the cultural mainstream they were trying to critique. That was one side of Wallace's critique of irony. He was suspicious of an irony that pretends it has the answers and confronts the world in the basic mood of paranoia and mockery. There is no real outside, he realized. There is no place above it all from which literature can speak to the world.
Click on the link above to read the rest of this worthwhile article.
