ellauri077.html on line 555: In his interview with Larry McCaffery, Wallace shows he was aware of his failure to overcome the use of postmodern irony: “I got trapped just trying to expose the illusions of metafiction the same way metafiction had tried to expose the illusions of the pseudo-unmediated realist fiction that had come before it. It was a horror show.”
ellauri077.html on line 627: This process does not lead to a passive, solely pleasurable experience such as taking a drug or watching television. Instead, what awaits that reader is a book that forces her “‘to work hard to access its pleasures, the same way that in real life true pleasure is usually a by-product of hard work and discomfort’” (McCaffery 119). Perhaps the most difficult aspect of Infinite Jest (and the one for which it is fated to be infamously known) is the use of endnotes, which will be our entry into thinking of Infinite Jest as a conversation-text.
xxx/ellauri075.html on line 474: A few years later, Wallace laid into “American Psycho” in an interview with Larry McCaffery, saying it “panders shamelessly to the audience’s sadism for a while, but by the end it’s clear that the sadism’s real object is the reader itself… You can defend ‘Psycho’ as being a sort of performative digest of late-eighties social problems, but it’s no more than that.”
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