The world's #1 David Foster Wallace fan and I discuss DFW Bros, Lauren Oyler, Patricia Lockwood, and the community of hardcore DFW fans that orients around the Wallace-L listserv.
Great convo. Not a huge DFW fan personally although I’ve read a decent amount. I think the backlash to him and his fans is partly a product of the revelations about his personal life and partly a broader sociological turn wrt gender relations and poptimism. Ironically enough they’re partially victims of what he describes in that Updike essay in Consider the Lobster. DFW is seen as a Great Msle Narcissist himself now, an exemplar of an extremely male strand of authors writing very highbrow, doorstopper novels for and about straight men. The great irony being of course that if you’ve read any of his interviews it’s pretty clear that DFW had a kind of troubled relationship with that tradition, and in a lot of ways saw what he was doing as fundamentally opposed to it.
Thanks for the convo. I both love DFW's work and am fascinated by the meta conversation about St. Dave.
However, I think there is an element to the latter discussion that is missed: DFW is (somewhat) right-coded to many modern readers yet his critical success is difficult to dispute. This creates some knee-jerk discomfort.
I haven't listened to the podcast yet (will do so later), but one comment I want to make is about the proliferation of "-bros". There's the "litbro" that loves DFW, the "filmbro" that loves Tarantino, and the "theobro" that is theologically conservative. All of them get regularly dunked on in their respective fields. I wonder if this phenomenon can be analyzed more in depth in the context of declining male influence and increased female influence in all those fields, framed in the overarching fact that women outpace men in college degrees. What does the "-bro" phenomenon say about modern conceptions of masculinity in a managerial-class environment?
Great convo. Not a huge DFW fan personally although I’ve read a decent amount. I think the backlash to him and his fans is partly a product of the revelations about his personal life and partly a broader sociological turn wrt gender relations and poptimism. Ironically enough they’re partially victims of what he describes in that Updike essay in Consider the Lobster. DFW is seen as a Great Msle Narcissist himself now, an exemplar of an extremely male strand of authors writing very highbrow, doorstopper novels for and about straight men. The great irony being of course that if you’ve read any of his interviews it’s pretty clear that DFW had a kind of troubled relationship with that tradition, and in a lot of ways saw what he was doing as fundamentally opposed to it.
Thanks for the convo. I both love DFW's work and am fascinated by the meta conversation about St. Dave.
However, I think there is an element to the latter discussion that is missed: DFW is (somewhat) right-coded to many modern readers yet his critical success is difficult to dispute. This creates some knee-jerk discomfort.
I haven't listened to the podcast yet (will do so later), but one comment I want to make is about the proliferation of "-bros". There's the "litbro" that loves DFW, the "filmbro" that loves Tarantino, and the "theobro" that is theologically conservative. All of them get regularly dunked on in their respective fields. I wonder if this phenomenon can be analyzed more in depth in the context of declining male influence and increased female influence in all those fields, framed in the overarching fact that women outpace men in college degrees. What does the "-bro" phenomenon say about modern conceptions of masculinity in a managerial-class environment?