Sophie Kemp at The Point:
Allow me, for a moment, to talk about David Foster Wallace. In 1993, Wallace wrote an essay, “E Unibus Pluram,” about the effects of television’s presence in contemporary literature. He argues that television, when written about in a postmodern context, often feels hackneyed. This fiction, he writes, “is not just a use or mention of televisual culture but a response to it, an effort to impose some sort of accountability on a state of affairs in which more Americans get their news from television than from newspapers.” But in trying to satirize television, he argues, these literary works just end up feeling like a pale imitation of the thing itself. Bland, forgettable, dated. The satire has no teeth.
Replace the word “television” with “internet” in “E Unibus Pluram,” and you will find that Wallace’s essay more or less holds up, 32 years later. That everything kind of falls apart, when you satirize the thing you’re also trying to imitate. That perhaps instead of writing a novel that, say, defamiliarizes the sensation of being on X, you could go on X and have it all defamiliarized for you. We are now in the very first wave of Zoomer literature, and these writers, like their predecessors, are still trying to shape the internet into prose.
more here.
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