Was DFW trolling with his top 10 list, or is it some levelling?
1. The Screwtape Letters, by C.S. Lewis
2. The Stand, by Stephen King
3. Red Dragon, by Thomas Harris
4. The Thin Red Line, by James Jones
5. Fear of Flying, by Erica Jong
6. The Silence of the Lambs, by Thomas Harris
7. Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert A. Heinlein
8. Fuzz, by Ed McBain
9. Alligator, by Shelley Katz
10. The Sum of All Fears, by Tom Clancy
no, he was trying verry hard to affect Regular Guyness, because it was his brand identity.
>>8124661
do regular guys have footnotes deriving the fundamental theorem of calculus
>>8124661
But surely, even the regular guy would sense the patronizing at the Tom Clancy selection, at least?
he was being faux-humble, turning in an almost parodically 'normal guy' middlebrow list (one that no actual normal guy would ever make) so people would go - woah - he writes infinite jest, but in the end, he's just another guy who loves soda pop and spy thrillers! -- only it doesn't work at all and makes him look like an insecure narcissist and elitist who - in his romanticizing of 'average people' takes an inherently condescending view of him, as if he's up there in the intellectual ivory tower but wants to escape, not realizing there is no tower and that he's actually lying in a deep grave
>>8124661
I think this is part of it, but also during that time college literature classes were trying hard to pander to the increasingly female student body. Many professors started taking "difficult" stuff like Shakespeare and Milton out of the syllabus and putting in "fun" shit like King and Harris.
Pandering to the student body just played into the kind of person DFW was—one who was almost desperate to be all-inclusive and generally nice.
>>8124669
Thats part of the point of the meme persona, radical incongruency
>>8124669
he was being self-effacing so he could get away with wankery such as that
he didn't want to be seen as a regular guy
he wanted to be seen as a special and unique person who saw himself as a regular guy
he wanted to appear like some unpretentious literary prodigy who doesn't know the talent he has
basically ego stroking
>>8124701
That doesn't sound very sincere.
>>8124672
>not realizing there is no tower and that he's >actually lying in a deep grave
Goddamn, dude
Do you think he was being completely insincere, or do you think he at least liked those books, even if he wouldnt have necessarily put them in his top 100?
>>8124672
this is a really depressing answer. he just said 10 books in a row.
>>8124672
That was pretty brutal, friend
>>8124763
unlike everyone else, i think he Sincerely™ enjoyed these books, probably more than he enjoyed 'serious' literature.
Here was STephen King's top 10. was he doing the opposite?
1. The Golden Argosy, The Most Celebrated Short Stories in the English Language – edited by Van Cartmell and Charles Grayson
2. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
3. The Satanic Verses – Salman Rushdie
4. McTeague – Frank Norris
5. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
6. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
7. 1984 – George Orwell
8. The Raj Quartet – Paul Scott
9. Light in August – William Faulkner
10. Blood Meridian – Cormac McCarthy
>>8124793
he tried to, anyways. in the end he looks like an even bigger pleb
>>8124712
And that's why he killed himself
>>8124798
A bigger pleb than dfw?
>>8124672
I got chills reading this
>>8124798
I actually have some respect for King. He was fully aware of the fact that he wasn't writing "great literature" as you might call it, and he didn't really try to defend himself for it, unlike some fantasy authors who talk about how they draw their inspiration from Shakespeare or other obvious pretensions.
>>8124793
>>8124658
I think both King and Wallace here are showing admiration for the CRAFT of writing, and not some vague idea of greatness of hierarchy that /lit/ gets hung up on. King listed authors who did things he could not. Wallace listed authors who communicate what they're after with great clarity to a wide audience, which is something he tried to do in numerous ways, with varying degrees of success. DFW's list is one of authors who keep it very simple and effective, which he appreciated but wanted to experiment with in ways that were not always simple.
>>8124672
Or this, but this just seems like cruelty for its own sake and ignores what Wallace actually wrote and tried to do.
>>8124658
DFW wrote and read for criteria pretty different from those that literary scholars focus on. He generally believed that a work should be analyzed holistically, focusing not only on the expression of themes but also formalistic characteristics like plot, prose, and structure. He really was a writer's writer.
This is why many more traditional analysts paint he and GRRM with the same brush: as very talented individuals whose Herculean efforts are ultimately unworthy of analysis due to being uninteresting or unoriginal in theme.
>>8124674
Almost universally, male students are the ones who can't focus on the canon and prefer to study commercial lit instead. I guarantee you that in any English department in any American university, a course on sci-fi or other genre fiction will be substantially more male than a course on Shakespeare.
>>8125047
Roastie detected.
>>8125047
that's why nearly every great novel was written by a man, right? :^)
>>8125115
top kek
>>8125121
We're talking about appreciation. Production is a different issue altogether.
>>8124658
of course he wasn't, he's just a pleb. have you even read IJ? guy was a damn pleb.
>>8125122
I'm but a simple farmer
tending to my memes
>>8125186
here a kek there a lel everywhere a doot doot
>>8124701
I think he actually wanted to be seen as a unique genius, who is so far above it all he sees Gestalts and such in regular guy books. Like he watches Transformers and sees pure American culture unfiltered by explanatory words.
He obviously wasn't that but he wanted to be seen that way.
>>8124658
I'm almost positive he just went somewhat autist about the specifics of the question. he took "your top ten books" to mean "your personal favorites" and not "what you think is GOAT". So he chose shit with sentimental value.
More people on /lit/ should do this actually. our top books threads are unbearable, niggas choosing Goethe and shit
>>8124658
Based on E Unibus Pluram and the Charlie Rose interview, Wallace wanted to write books that were both a) challenging to the reader and b) actually fun for normal people to read.
He seems to have felt that "academic fiction" or whatever you want to call it had gone to one extreme, and popular fiction had gone to the other extreme, and wanted his own books to be the middle ground.
His top ten favorite books list was probably completely honest.
>>8125186
This image has a strange beauty to it desu.
>>8125642
it really does
>>8124672
This is the only real answer, depressingly.
>>8124672
this is pretty brutal, but also not wrong.
>>8124672
I mean, this isn't entirely wrong, but think about why he was like that just a bit harder, and why he was the best selling author of the kind of books he wrote in his day. It's one thing to point at him and ridicule him for being so preoccupied with affectation that he was empty inside, but you're severely underestimating how anti-intellectual Americans were and still are. You can't go around saying your favorites include things like Finnegans Wake, even if they actually do, because people will just call you a pretentious faggot and will want to have nothing to do with you.
He took the act too far and turned into a caricature of himself, yes, but it's impossible to succeed in any profession, especially not anytime in the past 20 years without wearing some sort of mask to look like exactly what people want out of the role you're hoping to fill.
To be honest I think he may be being completely or almost completely genuine. He's said that he had a television addiction and almost nothing of intellectual value runs on television. I think he enjoys bad shit and good shit the same.
>>8126156
he transcended the good/bad dichotomy
>>8126156
I think it's a craft thing. He likes effective communication and watching a good communicator at work. The high or low browness is secondary to that.
>>8124819
this
and because King doesn't have the pretentions that DFW did, I actually find his novels to be subtly rewarding from time to time, while when reading IJ I feel like DFW is saying "look how much of a genius everyday joe i am lololol" while dick slapping me
>>8125047
A load of shit. The vast majority of English majors are female to begin with. There is no class where a guy dominates.
Why is this you wonder? Well, if you hadn't poisoned humanities with your queer and feminist cancer, there might have been a Sci-Fi class dominated by guys.
>>8124806
nice meme
I don't know, I feel like these responses are just this board reading everything through the meme-lens. The regular guy affectation was probably part of it, but he was also constantly running away from comparisons to his more obvious literary forefathers. If he'd filled in a list with Delillo and Pynchon and Barth, (all of whom he was open about liking), all people would talk to him about in interviews and such would be the influence of GR or Lost in the Funhouse had on IJ, instead of the book itself. If he had a list with Shakespeare and Chaucer everyone would call him a pretentious tryhard, or ask who he was trying to impress, so he gave in this list to avoid those things. I mean what list would have satisfied you people? Meme trilogy followed by a list of 20th century American Postmodernists?
>>8126381
it's just shitposting, don't take it too seriously
He made this list for some pleb magazine and wanted to recommend things regular people would actually read, so he compiled his favorite works of accessible pop fiction instead of namedropping his real favorites, i.e. Wittgenstein, Kant and the like, knowing that nobody seeing the list would actually pick one of these books up.
From another interview:
OK. Historically the stuff that's sort of rung my cherries: Socrates' funeral oration, the poetry of John Donne, the poetry of Richard Crashaw, every once in a while Shakespeare, although not all that often, Keats' shorter stuff, Schopenhauer, Descartes' [David Foster Wallace's Bookbag] "Meditations on First Philosophy" and "Discourse on Method," Kant's "Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysic," although the translations are all terrible, William James' "Varieties of Religious Experience," Wittgenstein's "Tractatus," Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," Hemingway -- particularly the ital stuff in "In Our Time," where you just go oomph!, Flannery O'Connor, Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, A.S. Byatt, Cynthia Ozick -- the stories, especially one called "Levitations," about 25 percent of the time Pynchon. Donald Barthelme, especially a story called "The Balloon," which is the first story I ever read that made me want to be a writer, Tobias Wolff, Raymond Carver's best stuff -- the really famous stuff. Steinbeck when he's not beating his drum, 35 percent of Stephen Crane, "Moby-Dick," "The Great Gatsby.
>>8126673
>Kant's "Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysic," although the translations are all terrible
>can't speak or read German but still shits on translations
That's why /lit/ loves him
>>8126679
he's our spirit animal.
We should make a meme that's an owl with dfw's face.
Or maybe we shouldn't. I'm drunk I have terrible ideas.
>>8126673
Wow, he has really similar taste to me. If he liked Camus and Kierkegaard we'd be set.
>>8124658
Is that Mynard from Tool in the picture?
>>8124658
Is that Shawn Michaels from WWE in the picture?
>>8126191
>le man of the people fetish
It's inferiority-complex having fags like this that make the sort of "I'm just a regular guy" posturing this thread is about necessary.
>>8124672
>not realizing there is no tower and that he's actually lying in a deep grave
Hey calm down there now Shyamalan
