Life & Wisdom Quote by David Foster Wallace

Already you can hear Wallace doing the thing he always does: undercutting authority even as he builds it. "This might be one way" is a hedge that reads like modesty but functions like a trapdoor. He gets to propose a framework without sounding like a gatekeeper, then invites you to follow him into a distinction he clearly thinks matters. The phrasing is seminar-room casual, but the stakes are literary and moral: not just who influenced whom, but what got lost when postmodernism became a style rather than a response.

The "early postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties" signals the first wave: people reacting to mass media, Cold War bureaucracy, advertising, the flattening of experience into spectacle. Their tricks (irony, fragmentation, self-reference) had urgency; they were defensive maneuvers against a culture that felt fake. "Contemporary descendants" is the knife twist. Descendants inherit habits without inheriting the original danger. Wallace is implying a drift from critique to costume, where irony becomes the default emotional posture and metafiction becomes a brand identity.

Context matters: Wallace comes of age in the 80s and 90s, when irony is no longer an insurgent tool but the house language of entertainment. His project is to reopen the possibility of sincerity without naivete. So he frames the comparison as a "way to start talking" because the real argument isn't taxonomy; it's ethics. What kind of writing can still mean something when cool detachment has already colonized the reader's defenses?