When I was a high schooler reading DFW I felt intimidated by his intelligence and his prose. Coming back to him I realize how much of a pseud he is. He's carried by his college sophomore-level knowledge of mathematics and his overuse of the thesaurus.But on a literary level, he's inept. Then I looked up who his influences were and it made sense. He has the tastes of a moderately advanced IB student. Pynchon, Dostoevsky, Gaddis, Stephen King, etc. Did he even read in any language besides English?He was a quant masquerading as a writer.
>>25195506He's definitely smart but it's the dime a dozen smart that was expected of older gens. If he was a millennial they would have sucked his dick even more for example, because expectations were lower.
>>25195511Yeah you're right. He's just like the top 2% outcome of a college-educated gen X'er. He was fluent in pop culture and whatever was "cool" for gen x'ers but nothing with depth.
Oh boy, another thread where we shit on stuff and act like that means we are smart despite never saying anything!
I am going to hijack this thread to ask if anyone in the NYC club scene in 1996 walked into a conversation about how New York Magazine basically canonized DFW in their review of Infinite Jest? I just watched 'End of the Tour', and that was the least believable thing about the movie.
>>25195514I mean isn't the whole point of new sincerity that you can go for shawarma with your bros after you're done reading?
>>25195527It can be entertaining, I won't deny it. It's the literary equivalent of The Critic. Entertaining but not art.
>>25195531sorry I forgot to explain the Critic comparison. Two artefacts of smarmy Gen X self-conscious media.
>>25195532I don't think the writer will ever hold such a privileged position again. You say he's a quant but I think he's completely unable to be a quant and coping, and back then society let him.
>>25195506The OG performative male
If DFW was a pseud then what are you?
DFW only sounds smart because the DEI retards that are in the publishing industry. A lot of why he's venerated is because of two factors.>some genuine talent in writing about what normies don't notice or can't write about>writing in an era where complete nonsense was mistaken for avant-garde art
>>25195506>Did he even read in any language besides English?what a gay question to ask
>>25195531>Entertaining but not art.how's the inside of your colon smell? because you're pretty far up there
>>25195516>>25195817>>25195898>>25195900DFW fanboys are funny because theyll cry and call you an elitist if you criticize the ur-windbag who delighted in making his books more difficult than they needed to be.
>>25195506and you’re way smarter than him. that’s why you’re here. talking to us.
DFW is FUBU for white guys in college. It has nothing to do with the real world and everything to do with being an institutionalized pseud on drugs in and out of classrooms.
if I only had 1% of his talent I could be a published writer
>>25195516>>25195817>>25195898>>25195900>t. The Clipperton brigade
>>25195506120 iq midwit Kurt cobain groupie
>>25196123Yeah, I think about that every time I post in one of these threads.
>>25196086>[dfw's writing] has nothing to do with the real world and everything to do with being an institutionalized pseud on drugs in and out of classroomsand moby dick has to do with being a whalerman and tess of the durbevilles a pregnant country-lass and the metamorphosis a bug
if you want insight into why DFW is a good writer, i recommend reading this 2026 Atlantic article on sports betting:https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/04/online-sports-betting-app-addiction/686061/and this 2025 Harpers article on gooning:https://harpers.org/archive/2025/11/the-goon-squad-daniel-kolitz-porn-masturbation-loneliness/and then compare and contrast with DFW's 1998 essay on the porn industry awards in Las Vegas (and try not feeling depressed about how wretchedly unimaginative our contemporary literary culture has become):https://esq.h-cdn.co/assets/cm/15/06/54d45399935cb_-_DF-Wallace-Big-Red-Son.pdf
>>25195506his and Zadie Smith's books glow in the dark
>>25195921There was a time (all of modernism) when making your work as hard as possible was seen as the ultimate goal. The more densely allusive, the better. All the more you could study it for years. That people now shirk from any kind of intellectual engagement doesn't mean our reading is any more "authentic."
>>25196365>>25195921Infinite Jest isn't even that difficult to read. No more so than a Dickens novel or some 18th-century comic picaresque like Roderick Random. It's just big. And what's impressive about it is that it condenses a culture so sprawling and diffuse as 90s America into an object with page-to-page readability and aesthetic coherence and a sense of comprehensive totality. That, not the perceived difficulty, is imo the point - the construction of a world out of the scraps of contemporary worldlesness. (It's what Fred Jameson r.i.p. would call a project of cognitive mapping.) The postmodernist price to pay is that it becomes a private world, the DFW world, and so is more bound up with his personal language and milieu and 'brand' than any Dickens or Smollett novel would be - but in the late-20th-century cultural situation faced by DFW you needed that force of eccentric personality to glue together such a world of fragmented forms and experience. It's a feat that no longer seems possible, however much personality and energy and imagination you have at your disposal. Anyway those are the terms in which I read DFW. And I wish that even and especially the anons who don't like him would try to exit the cave of meme-cast shadows and engage a little harder with the texts themselves; then they might have an original and interesting criticism to post here one of these days. I live in hope.
to be frank in my research about the book i think its meant to be exactly what you guys are criticizing it for. my reading of IJ was that DFW didnt understand that "the map is not the terrain" (reinforced by that one story from Oblivion with the therapist and the mc killing himself) and that he was consciously trying to get people to read again by putting well-known classic lit titles and ideas that would be seen as "smart" by mass audiences in a crazy context. if you want cynical 90s kids to read again, thats how you get them to do it. hes not my favorite but getting mad that IJ is a cross between entertainment and literature is like getting mad that the sky is blue. wtf else is it supposed to be
>>25196390Should I read Infinite Jest then? I can't tell if you're saying it's good or bad.
>>25196518How about you give it a try? It's a book. You can just open it up. I (not the same person) loved it, save for like a couple short segments that I thought were a bit overly silly. Thought it was very insightful and often beautiful.
>>25196523>just open it upOk I will give it a go
>>25196390Agreed 100%. It's really frustrating when people dismiss others as a "pseud" or "pretentious" without even properly defining their terms or engaging with the text. The OP might as well be gibberish
>>25196123I'm actually Mike Pemulis IRL
>>25197022You should have helped your brother, Mike.
>>25195506>guys look how smart I am this guy is retarded i hate this guy aren't i smart, look at me I'm SO ironic and smug and detached lolYou need to read Infinite Jest, I think you'd relate to it a lot. The whole book is about Wallace's journey through addiction recovery and realizing he really was a bit of a midwit, getting off his addiction to his own farts (and weed), and learning to be humble enough to genuinely connect with people on a deep level, both personally and in his writing.
>>25195514>He's just like the top 2% outcome of a college-educated gen X'erOnly about 1/3 of Gen X graduated college. Top 2% of the 33% most educated is certainly "elite." I always find it funny seeing 4trooners call other people who have accomplished more than they ever will "pseuds" or mocking their intelligence.
>>25197085What did I say that was ironic? You read 1000 pages of that shit and you don't know what irony is?>>25197098>conflating college-educated with college graduateA logic error even a dimwit could spot.Can any of the fanboys answer my question whether he read any other language than English or whether he had any passing knowledge of a non-modern American body of literature? It seems like no.
>>25195511If he were a millenial the publishing industry would have been too busy astroturfing women and minorities to pay attention to him.
>>25197115Behold the seethe and aggression of the exposed pseud. Many such cases.
It is very funny that 95% of the book-reading board is, "I'd never read this book, you utter cretins."
>>25197131yes they're all over this thread crying about their idol
>>25197115He could apparently read some French but mostly read translations. You already said he liked Dostoevsky, although it seems he was most familiar with American and British novels. What kind of imposition is this anyway? Would you refuse to read Tolstoy if he could only read in Russian? Would you refuse to read Shakespeare knowing he mostly referenced classical works by their English translations?
>>25197148Thank you for reminding me that arguing with retarded strangers on the internet is a massive waste of time. I'll be taking my leave now and doing things that are actually worthwhile.
>>25197115>conflating college-educated with college graduateYa those are largely synonymous, nice cope thoughie
>>25195514his prose is good, he had a good ear for the language but you're right, he was a severely undereducated pop culture tard, if he'd had the kind of education they doled out in 1890 his output would have been legendary. big talent but it was already over by the time came of age. i've never enjoyed or respected him and i won't be reading past broom of the system.
>>25195506It's just a fucking airport give it a rest bub...
>>25197161But I didn't refuse to read DFW. I read him. I ask because it would help explain his myopia and his fixations on American pop culture. You can be a fine writer without being well read but he wasn't.>>25197175nah especially in the 80's you'd have a lot of people who took classes but never got a degree>>25197171yw
>>25197257You're a furry neet so you opinion on anything is worthless
>>25197121Good to see /lit/ is still taking care of its golden goose.
>>25195921>>25196086>>25197115Getting filtered this hard by a for-fun read like IJ is really embarrassing. Browsing this board is sad. You see so many losers who attach their identity to being a “reader” and end up an embarrassingly pretentious loser. Even if you were this “sophisticated reader” with superior taste that you try to paint yourself as you would still be pathetic and insecure. Go to the beach and talk to people in the real world and get off of your meds. Whatever you are doing isn’t working.
>>25197486If you just see it as a fun read that's fine. It's pretty much if you gave a Rolling Stone columnist 1000 pages to write whatever comes to his head. Mildly entertaining in doses.Im concerned for the guys who call it one of the greatest novels ever or one of the great American novels etc.
>>25197544The fact that you care so much about how much others like it is fucking pathetic. If you don’t like it fine. If you love it fine. Who fucking cares. It isn’t that serious. Worry about something that matters to you and your family. No one cares if you have good taste in books or not. Grow the fuck up and stop being ugly.
>>25197551embarrassing post
>>25197551>goes to literature board>gets personally offended when people want to re-evaluate literature
>>25197486But it's not fun to read. It reads like an absurd comedy.
>>25197613>>25197677>>25197719you guys can cope and pretend that I am a dfw fan if it helps you feel better about yourselves. It doesn’t matter to me but you should think about what I said. Your attitudes are pathetic. It is clear that you are insecure and trying way too hard.
>>25197551>>25197748>Worry about something that matters to you and your family.does it matter to your family if anons on 4chan don't like dfw?
Sure keep pretending that I was defending dfw to justify continuing to be a pitiful and insecure faggot. dfw fans mog you intellectually. You guys make shit up like emotional lefties on social media. It is embarrassing. You aren’t even worth trying to help. Continue to be an insufferable fag if you want. I doubt anyone else will try to help you.
>>25197813Hey Jon
>>25195519No one?
>>25197827Nigga I was five
>>25197827i got to nyc in 98 and i was too young and broke to get into any clubs, but what does that have to do with dfw? if u look at some old video of twilo or whatever, no one is sitting around talking about literature, it's a club people are dancing and doing drugs.
>>25196390Currently 2/3rds of the way through IJ and have some thoughts. First, the man's obsession with suicide comes through too strongly in the book. It carries that flavor that The Bell Jar does when any reader should automatically know the author was destined to erase his own map. The sheer number of suicidal or suicided characters is just too much, even for a drug addled, over entertained corporate dystopia, and serves somewhat to limit the diversity of characters and characterization (almost every character has one form or another of the same kind of pathology, it seems to me, namely, the author's own, which I suppose is its own kind of legacy, but for me so far is not a point in the novel's favor). There appears to be a deliberate cynical melancholy tied up with this point, a sort of relentless hopelessness, which is only intensified and made to be further distasteful knowing the author killed himself. A phrase keeps coming to mind as I read, which is "brevity is the soul of wit" as I plunge through the multiple multi-paged single paragraphs which attempt to produce a kind of effect in the reader while refusing to actually convey any meaningful information. I also do not care for the format of having chapter-length foot notes inserted into a completely unrelated chapter.I suppose it is a cliche (especially around here) that criticism is easier than praise, but I do have a certain fascination with the novel and have been reasonably entertained by the humor at times. The dysfunctional Incandenza family is well crafted and believable in its multi-leveled psychopathology. I feel I have to refer to my earlier point, though, that it seems every family outlined in the novel has some form of unfaithful marriage and grotesque child abuse (direct or indirect, usually psychological). I'll probably post more as I progress to the end of the novel, but so far I am, to say the least, mixed on the merits of the novel.
>>25195506That's what makes him interesting
>>25195506pseudo intellectuals are just untrained intellectuals. Intellectuals in a raw and honest state. Trained intellectuals are always mouthpieces because they have to be.
I like authors based on whether they would have posted here. So I like DFW.
>>25197748Is there a specific reason why you’re so mad?
DFW gets far too much genuine hate here these days. It’s not fair. Pick on fucking Bolano or something, he deserves it
>>25198233Bolaño was an encyclopedic reader and dedicated his life in poverty to literature and dying for it. DFW was a pop culture enthusiast who got the fame and success and riches and threw it away.
>>25198238>DFW was a pop culture enthusiast who got the fame and success and riches and threw it away.That’s… kinda awesome?
>>25198238the weight of genius is a heavy burden to bear, are you mad at Hemmingway for killing himself too?
>>25198243>weight of geniusWe're talking about DFW?
>>25197846Crazy… lot of younger folk here these days.
>>25198244Yes. Infinite Jest is a masterpiece. IDK what it is about it that makes you seethe, but you should get over it.
>>25198251Like another anon said, it's a "for fun read." Masterpiece, lol. Read moar.
>>25198244I’m literally Jiren by the way and if you said that to my face I would pummel you straight into next week. I’ve had just about enough of your disrespect for King David.
>>25198252it's literally a great book in American canon, stop with your hatred train you midwit
>>25198351>it's literally a great book in American canonAccording to who? The esteemed critics of Slate dot com? It was torn to shreds by all real scholars of literature.
~800 pages into IJ and honestly the more I read it the more I like it. It unironically gets good 600 pages in. I has its flaws (though everything does) and can be almost jarring at times, but the breadth and depth of the thing impresses me. I respect its author and enjoy reading it, simple as.Just wish my eyes didn't hurt so much...
