"This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties and their contemporary descendants"
About this Quote
David Foster Wallace signals a pivot point: to distinguish the pioneers of postmodernism from those who inherited their moves. The earliest postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties forged irony, metafiction, and fragmentation as insurgent tools. Against Cold War conformity, institutional authority, and the bland certainties of midcentury realism, their playfulness carried moral heat. Exposing narrators as artificers, mocking official language, and bending genre were ways to make readers more alert, less credulous, more free.
By the late twentieth century, the cultural terrain had shifted. Television, advertising, and mass culture had absorbed the very techniques that once felt subversive. Irony became ambient rather than insurgent, a fluent dialect of commercials and sitcoms. The clever wink no longer promised liberation; it risked becoming a posture that protected the writer from vulnerability. Many contemporary descendants mastered the grammar of self-reference and pastiche, but the gambit now often yielded safety rather than risk, cool distance rather than contact.
Wallace urges a different starting point for the conversation: look not at the surface tricks alone but at their ethical vector. What was once a scalpel for cutting through cant can harden into armor that keeps feeling at bay. The difference, then, is a difference in stakes and intention. The pioneers were breaking a lock; their heirs confront a room where the door is already off its hinges and the tricks are decor. In that room, the challenge is to reclaim sincerity without naivete, to risk sentiment without kitsch, to write in a way that cannot be effortlessly co-opted by marketing.
His tentative phrasing matters. He is not handing down a taxonomy but proposing a way to begin again, to ask how fiction might restore trust and meaning after irony’s victory. The point is not to abandon postmodern strategies but to redeploy them toward connection, responsibility, and hope.
By the late twentieth century, the cultural terrain had shifted. Television, advertising, and mass culture had absorbed the very techniques that once felt subversive. Irony became ambient rather than insurgent, a fluent dialect of commercials and sitcoms. The clever wink no longer promised liberation; it risked becoming a posture that protected the writer from vulnerability. Many contemporary descendants mastered the grammar of self-reference and pastiche, but the gambit now often yielded safety rather than risk, cool distance rather than contact.
Wallace urges a different starting point for the conversation: look not at the surface tricks alone but at their ethical vector. What was once a scalpel for cutting through cant can harden into armor that keeps feeling at bay. The difference, then, is a difference in stakes and intention. The pioneers were breaking a lock; their heirs confront a room where the door is already off its hinges and the tricks are decor. In that room, the challenge is to reclaim sincerity without naivete, to risk sentiment without kitsch, to write in a way that cannot be effortlessly co-opted by marketing.
His tentative phrasing matters. He is not handing down a taxonomy but proposing a way to begin again, to ask how fiction might restore trust and meaning after irony’s victory. The point is not to abandon postmodern strategies but to redeploy them toward connection, responsibility, and hope.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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