“For me, the last few years of the postmodern era have seemed a bit like the way you feel when you're in high school and your parents go on a trip, and you throw a party. You get all your friends over and throw this wild disgusting fabulous party. For a while it's great, free and freeing, parental authority gone and overthrown, a cat's-away-let's-play Dionysian revel. But then time passes and the party gets louder and louder, and you run out of drugs, and nobody's got any money for more drugs, and things get broken and spilled, and there's cigarette burn on the couch, and you're the host and it's your house too, and you gradually start wishing your parents would come back and restore some fucking order in your house. It's not a perfect analogy, but the sense I get of my generation of writers and intellectuals or whatever is that it's 3:00 A.M. and the couch has several burn-holes and somebody's thrown up in the umbrella stand and we're wishing the revel would end. The postmodern founders' patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years. We're kind of wishing some parents would come back. And of course we're uneasy about the fact that we wish they'd come back--I mean, what's wrong with us? Are we total pussies? Is there something about authority and limits we actually need? And then the uneasiest feeling of all, as we start gradually to realize that parents in fact aren't ever coming back--which means we're going to have to be the parents.”
>>7412953
I'm honestly just surprised he's got something to say about post-modernism in general. After what he's written, he doesn't seem the type.
dfw said that shit you imbecile
Why didn't Wallace become fucking Catholic or Orthodox if he wanted order and structure so badly?
>>7412946
just admits to being a closet sissy
>>7412946
Enough of this meme please
>>7412946
I am not especially impressed with the analogy but I do have a measure of respect for him now that I see he has had the balls to take a stand against the monolithic postmodern trend in art.
>>7413073
This isn't lit
>>7412946
holy shit this guy gets wet for authority
>>7412946
really? everyone that agrees should kill themselves forthwith.
>>7412946
Holy shit that hair
JUST
What if john green started lifting
>>7412946
>This quote is 22 years old.
>>7413007
He flunked the period of inquiry.
>people are falling in the trap
Wow you motherfuckers really don't read
he's not wrong
What's so bad about postmodernism?
>>7413512
Have you ever bought the wrong flavor of cheese? Well it's nothing like that.
>>7413513
kek
>>7412946
>we start gradually to realize that parents in fact aren't ever coming back--which means we're going to have to be the parents.”
This is a very perceptive thought - if people only approached post-modernism from a Stirnerist position, at least then they could concede that we do need external authority and limits to what we do or write, but only in the most arbitrarily selective approach, choosing when and where our own limits are according to what best serves ourselves or our work as an end in itself.
>>7412946
John Green should get a haircut and a job.
This whole view of postmodernism is completely exaggerated and almost utopian in what it takes itself to have accomplished or where it stands in relation to modernism. The attitude DFW takes that it is his task to somehow repair the damage postmodernism has done is even more ludicrous.
At the very most what we have seen in the late 20th century is very beginnings of a notion of postmodernism and not at all a full or even partial break from modernism. There is shy hinting and suggestion of something else but nothing more.
It still remains a task to truly break with modernity.
>>7413778
>It still remains a task to truly break with modernity.
fuck that
postmodernity is literally worse than the holocaust
>>7413793
I was gonna tell you not to cut yourself on that edge, but for you I would actually recommend self harm.
>>7413802
LITERALLY WORSE
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>>7413793
Well if modernity literally IS the holocaust, as so many have argued, then I would only hope that a post-modernity can learn something from it so that it may never happen again. Somehow, that DOESN'T seem the case, and to my mind, this is precisely what it means to have never been post-modern.
>>7413828
You're misunderstanding.
I'm saying that we should have another holocaust so that postmodernity could fuck off.
>>7413856
I understood you, but I didn't think it was worth replying to what you really meant. And it still isn't. We will probably have another holocaust, by the way. And that's just because post-modernity has not happened.
>>7413513
lel
>>7415342
Can you explain what that post means?
>>7412946
>like the way you feel when you're in high school and your parents go on a trip, and you throw a party.
I don't know how that feels though.
>>7413513
heh
>>7413513
kljasd
