What the hell is Westward the Course of the Empire Takes Its Way about?
>reading DFW
When will you learn? HOLY SHIT
>>8098587
I can imagine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OQXUnYvLgg
>>8098587
LM: Isn’t Armageddon the course you set sail for in “Westward”?
DFW: Metafiction’s real end has always been Armageddon. Art’s reflection on itself is terminal, is one big reason why the art world saw Duchamp as an Antichrist. But I still believe the move to involution had value: it helped writers break free of some long-standing flat-earth-type taboos. It was standing in line to happen. And for a while, stuff like “Pale Fire” and “The Universal Baseball Association” was valuable as a meta-aesthetic breakthrough the same way Duchamp’s urinal had been valuable.
>>8098828
ughhhhhhhhhhhhhh
>>8099100
haven't read DFW but of the meme trilogy he seems to be the only one who is truly a meme.
>>8098587
Have you read Lost in the Funhouse? It's a pretty direct response to that and is essentially a condemnation of that sort of metafiction without really managing to escape it.
>>8099155
Joyce is actually the biggest memester of the three. It's just that Finnegans Wake was a bigger meme than Ulysses. He even anticipated words like kek in it.
>>8099185
What does "meme" mean?
>>8099168
Weird. I'm reading Lost in the Funhouse right now.
>>8099168
Octet was his best attempt at critiquing metafiction with metafiction.
>>8099285
I mean it should be pretty obvious, then. If I remember correctly there's an explicit epigraph from it. Then there's the fact that the writing program is modeled after Barth's at Hopkins with a Barth stand-in named after the main character in Lost in the Funhouse. The clown, building the funhouses... it's all very transparent.
>>8099155
He is the biggest meme for sure, mainly because he turned himself into a meme of the tortured genius (as shown above trying to say so much with saying nothing at all), he tried to make himself into an enigma of the novelist that had been lost for years and ended up just being a lame meme and made what Franzen called a career move to prevent negative criticism
