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david foster wallace-the problem with irony

submitted by enoch

7 years 4 months 2 weeks ago

author david foster wallace and his take on the post-modern cultural saturation of the over-use of irony,fueled by cynicism,which offers a negative contribution to societal understandings.

will shroder explains wallace's take on irony and how in the 90's and early 2000's had saturated american television,and points out the lack of sincerity,and compares that understanding to the newer shows who are slowly beginning to re-introduce the very important dynamic of sincerity,which when balanced with irony,can produce much better shows,and hence influence our culture.

3 Comments

It seems odd to suggest people take life lessons from a person that intentionally ended their life.

I totally disagree. Irony is a useful tool to force people to self examine their own thoughts and beliefs, find flaws, and hopefully work to improve. It seems the voiceover guy is conflating irony and cynicism.
Even cynicism has it's usefulness. We need cynics to critically examine our prejudices, debunk them when appropriate, and set us straight. If we didn't have people who were cynical, we would all just accept whatever we're told without anyone ever checking to see if it's true (a HUGE problem with people today).

He also compares being sincere with being cynical. They are not opposites by any means. One can be sincerely cynical.

I find the ending confusing. Again, he takes a life lesson from DFW about how to be "human", "be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo prone and generally pathetic"....since that mindset led to him commit suicide, it seems to be terrible advice to end on.

crotchflame says...

It seems odd to suggest that people shouldn't take life lessons from someone that happened to end their own life.

That said, I don't disagree on the video. On top of that, he doesn't seem to be connecting much of what he's saying to Wallace in any direct way. Based off of one quote that I googled and am now drawing too many conclusions from (link below), Wallace seemed to think that irony was a very valuable backlash to the 50's and 60's but that it ran its course.

http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/165289-irony-and-cynicism-were-just-what-the-u-s-hypocrisy-of

Moving this video to enoch's personal queue. It failed to receive enough votes to get sifted up to the front page within 2 days.

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