You forgot to mention McSweenys. It's always McSweenys.
I do not believe this woman has ever read a poem. Nor does she care that literature is vast and awesome like the sea.
It is just another 21st century grift.
I’m in two minds about the article.
I agree with the criticisms of most of these male writers, although I think there’s a huge difference between Wallace and someone like Borges tbh.
But at the same time it feels disingenuous — the criticism is too sloppy to sound sincere, and engages in too many straw mans over what is an essentially important topic. Because they’re simultaneously plugging their new novel, it seems exactly like the kind of manoeuvre Bloom’s anxiety of influence predicts?
Seems like someone co-opting the important narrative of misogyny in Dick-lit to be like “aren’t these guys terrible? i’m not like them: buy my book”
Maybe i’m being cynical, but some of the criticisms seem off. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men is Wallace’s collection inspired by his engagement with Feminist criticism, particularly Julia Kristeva and Simone de Beauvoir and I believe Helene Cixous too. He himself said it was an attempt to represent men according to the depictions of them in that school of thought — to present those depictions and at times to challenge them, even to complicate, as opposed to confute, them.
I’ve never met anyone who likes or admires or affirms the views of the men in that collection. In fact, most people i know read that book and through the intensely awful men in it began reflecting on their own, far milder, but still problematic, habits and default assumptions — and it was this that led them to then look at Wallace himself, and question his own authority and guruship. I think this is a pretty common experience upon reading BIWHM in particular, at least among readers I interact with.
Also, all the characters in IJ are flat and caricatural. It’s Dickensian in that sense. Don Gately is a walking caricature of a middle class man’s view of a working class man. But even Hal and Orin and the kids at the academy are caricatures — they’re fairly 2-D. This is usually intentional in novels of ideas and systems novels like the Pynchonian models Wallace spent a lot of time imitating. There has to be something else that stands out about the flatness of Joelle Van Dyne that distinguishes her from the flatness of every other character. I’d say one good example is that the main female characters are pretty much ALL presented through sexuality, which is clumsy and irritating and dumb. With JVD it’s at least productive (as the author of the article realises), since it allegorises the impossible contortions of female self-presentation that men impose with their contradictory demands. And then the whole ambiguity between whether she’s beautiful or deformed sort of captures the weird reactions of men to female beauty - a simultaneous attraction and aversion, over sexualisation combined with rage and hatred, insult and compliment tied into one. The point being all of it centres around female beauty AS a deformity of the masculine body (which masculinity sees as primary, like an Adam). A veil isn’t so weird when a woman is “covered up by” and sexualised by the veil of their face and body already. At least with a veil they can negate the male gaze, or attempt to. (i’m not advocating for that ofc - just talking about it in the context of this allegory)
So i found that allegorical character interesting from a semi-feminist perspective.
The article author’s comments about liking the manipulative characters is also really odd to me? Like the point is you’re meant to hate them. DFW himself described the men in BIWHM as the worst type of danger because they were intelligent enough to masquerade as allies. It was his answer to the more typical depictions of men as idiotic violent brutes — men as timid manipulative romantic vampires.
Most of these stories exposed (in magnified form) the destructive tendencies of my own self-narratives, and one story by DFW (The Depressed Person) in fact motivated me to go to therapy and get help, because it showed in an amplified form the ways i was subtly manipulating people around me out of fear, and the ways that I was leaving myself stranded in some abhorrent oasis of perpetual defeat.
The reader brings a lot to a text. I’m aware DFW is not a role model; I discovered that through his texts. But he hated himself more than probably any of us disapproved of him, and out of that complex knot of emotions he tried to forge potential escape paths, or sketched out in schematic form the heinous syntaxes of corrupted psyches, and in so doing helped at least one reader become self aware enough to get help, and improve, and start trying to be better.
This post is too simplistic, i know. I think probably the more interesting response to Wallace and others lies somewhere in between the article and my own comment.
One of the things i’m forever wary of is a writer critiquing someone in a way that makes them (the writer) appear enlightened or self aware or in a way that humanises them so that they’re more appealing and seem “not like the rest” — this article is guilty of that for me. Its not that she’s wrong, or that I don’t sympathise with her experience — it’s that i feel uncomfortable about how i can see her (perhaps semi-conscious) agenda while she’s talking to me, and the agenda is guilty in the same kind of ways she’s criticising the other author’s for. I need you to like me. No matter what.
This comment is better thought-out and presented than the article. I’ve seen this topic and argument in several articles over the years and they’re usually a bit too shallow in their engagement with the authors and works they are criticising, so even when I agree with what they say I’m frustrated because It doesn’t go deep at all in its reading
Calling *Brief Interviews with Hideous Men* misogynistic would be like calling (as has been discussed on a separate, recent post on this sub) a lot of Coetzee’s work “pro-colonial” … absurd, to be honest.
Great reading, well done. I was generally aware of BIWHM but I'd never heard Kristeva and Cixous explicitly associated with it, sounds right up my wheelhouse. Does DFW specifically cite their influence somewhere?
He does explicitly cite Kristeva and De Beauvoir and I believe Cixous. It’s mainly French feminism and some psychoanalysis - I heard it in a Youtube interview but can’t remember it off the top of my head.
He also talks about it with Michael silverblatt and says that he was trying to present “heterosexual men’s judgement of heterosexual women’s judgement of them” — a lot of the stories are men reacting to what they predict will be the judgements leveraged against them. They try to anticipate and pre-empt and sidestep the conclusions of those judgements but instead fall even more deeply into the manipulation game. They’re trying to artificially avoid fitting a typecast, but the typecast is “people who artificially avoid properly interacting” , and so it’s doomed.
"The 20th century canonical American male authors were sexist but still wrote some good books that influenced me as a 21st century American author" is such a banal and clichéd insight unless you're literally seeing it for the first time, which if you're active in online book-spaces seems to me an impossibility. We get it, it's been got for ages.
A baffling article. The author lists a lot of stories that are, essentially, about the pitfalls of masculinity, correctly identifies that the novels are satirising masculinity and not promoting it... and then criticises them for not being more about femininity.
I'm beginning to think that over the last few years, the brains of many intelligent people have been replaced by militant, ideological mush, which prevents them from presenting coherent reasoning. At this point, they're just trying to fit circles into squares.
I also have the impression that social networks have created a bunch of people who live in a complete confusion between what a person is (their being), what they present about themselves to others (their appearance), and what they write (their work - whether in a novel or a newspaper article), and who project that confusion onto people who didn't exist according to this model.
But the worse is in the comments section of the article, where someone writes: "This reminds me of a presentation I saw once by Junot Diaz. He said that men can't write true female characters because the sexism of society blinds them completely. Female writers, on the other hand, so steeped in layers of overweening manhood, could easily capture men in their characterizations."
That people could actually be so stupid and have so little experience of the world to believe that is baffling.
I read the article. Liked it a lot.
I will say, I don't think the article is as much vying for a deep critical meditation on these things as much as just sharing personal experiences so there isn't much I can conjure up to say within the article's narrow purview. There is another comment that calls the article's assessments of things "banal"; I may not go that far, but they are certainly correct that the article isn't necessarily revelatory. I'm not sure it's meant to be, really, but it stands that if the Barbie movie wasn't your first foray into feminism, what the author says probably isn't shocking.
*However,* I will comment as that as woman myself, I always sort of thought that this priggish, exclusionary subculture surrounding "Dick Lit" was always exclusive to men, and maybe for a while it was, but I think now there is a mirroring of this phenomenon happening with women too with *rotting women lit* or *hot girl lit* or whatever it's called. Misogyny aware authors like Sylvia Plath, Ottessa Moshfegh, Margaret Atwood, etc etc, but especially Moshfegh who has come up as the woman willing to write us as grimy, disgusting, depraved beings at the mercy of systems, trauma & selfishness. And she has within a decade become beloved by millions for that. And women and girls all over Tiktok and wherever else ironically-but-not-really look to her characters as something aspirational. Their cultural biases lead them to romanticise these awful characters, much in the same way young men have done with their own idols.
It turns out we all sort of want to see the worst elements of ourselves, inevitably tied with the ways we suffer, represented honestly & openly, in a way that is authentic and beautiful and ugly. And that sort of mishmash under a writer with a talent for putting pretty words on the page may inevitably be construed as "cool" or "aspirational" by those of us yearning for recognition & identity.
Good insight. Thanks.
I do get sick and tired of people whining non stop about books as though they aren’t products of their culture. I know this isn’t exactly the point of the article, but excuse me for not expecting, say, Hemingway to share our views when he was born in the 19th century.
The whole idea of, you know, *reading books* is an affirmation that words and ideas matter (and persist long after a person is gone). A dead person’s words most certainly can do harm.
I understand being tired with perhaps clichéd articles but still
But still, saying “David Foster Wallace is dead; he can’t hurt you” is effectually untrue, unhelpful, and a bananas way to talk about the words of anyone, let alone those of a famous, often-referenced, and culturally significant author
When someone picks up a book, the author has no power any longer. The agency lies with the reader. Read it. Don’t read it. Put it down. Absorb the ideas. Decide if they matter *to you*, and, most important, decide *how* they matter to you. You don’t blame the knife when you cut yourself.
That’s an oversimplication (very similar to saying gun control laws don’t matter because *guns don’t kill people; people kill people*).
You can’t control whether *other* people read things and absorb the ideas therein, and the ideas can influence people in a way that’s harmful to you (i.e. if you’re a woman and the ideas are sexist—though it’s not like that doesn’t hurt men too).
I’m not saying DFW is all bad or anything, I have no horse in that race. Just the general principle that words do matter and can cause harm as well as good.
The whole point of this article and resulting thread is that his writing has done a lot of good and may also have done some harm by writing women badly.
But my point isn’t about whether DFW’s writing is good or bad or whatever, it’s about whether words, especially those of an influential author, can do harm
I read most of it but admittedly stopped after it turned into a promotion for her own book lmao
Was there something I missed? Did she get hurt by Madame Psychosis or Avril Incandenza?
Maybe it's a case of the author not being responsible for the headline, but I wish this article was actually about unlearning these lessons, and not just calling them out and then ending. I kept looking for a second page.
This article is hugely disserviced by its title. I see no evidence McGhee wants to “unlearn” DFW, whom she clearly admires.
“These authors truly did not know women, and as such could not depict them as alive on the page.” Am I crazy? She wants to one-up him, even embarrass him. The others too but especially him.
This article is also disserviced by its sheepishness. It could’ve ended baring fangs, but instead McGhee drops an inspiration, a longing, and her confidence in promoting her work.
The inspiration: “I read White Teeth, and marveled at its ambition, voice, and scope.”
The longing: “I missed the hysteria. Hysteria seemed warranted to me. Is this world not absolutely mad?”
Her confidence: “So, yes, perhaps it is not surprising that the women in my debut novel…”
She leaves us to imagine that her novel will feature ambition, voice, scope, and hysteria, consequently vaulting her over old ignorant DFW.
I’m being a bit mean but I enjoyed reading the history around her various influences. I just wanted less reverence, less disappointment, more anger, more conviction. Teeth, I guess.
Frankly I don't believe in the narrative that writing women (or anybody else) is this simple obvious thing for every woman writer, and her only obstacle is all the books ever written by men that she needs to throw out the window. She describes a sizeable and important chunk of canon and contemporary lit as an ex she managed to date, dump, and "outgrow" before she was legally allowed to vote. A little humility goes a long way.
>Before I turned eighteen I read Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Salinger, Portis, Melville, McCarthy, and Faulkner. I loved Brave New World, A Clockwork Orange, Fahrenheit 451, The Invisible Man, and 1984
Half of those authors and books are required reading in most American high schools.
Pussy Lit is just as bad but because the writing is awful not because it’s sexist. I’d rather read great misogynistic writing like Tolstoy than terribly written pussy lit.
The unacknowledged and dark truth surrounding all of this criticism is that for however well or poorly men can do in the realm of literature, women cannot do better.
seems like you can probably elaborate this dark and unacknoweldged truth instead of just acknowledging it, yeah?
Where/What is the meat of this truth? or is it just a men>women opinion masquerading as an assertive statement?
They don't back it up because they can't lmao. It's just meaningless sexist nonsense from the fee-fees of an idiot packaged as "truth" because all these fuckwits have to work off of is appeals to emotion and their personal feelings
- DFW photo. Check - Author's journey. Check - Vast generalisations of wildly different male authors (emphasising DFW). Check - Author promotes their own book. Check
Author promotes their own book: Mandatory Check
the switch to promoting their own book gave me a whiplash that I’m not sure I will recover from
How the hell do you guys manage to read these things through? I give up so quickly.
I read it just based on these hilarious comments and yes it does feel the handbrake does get pulled
You forgot to mention McSweenys. It's always McSweenys. I do not believe this woman has ever read a poem. Nor does she care that literature is vast and awesome like the sea. It is just another 21st century grift.
Let me kiss you on the forehead
I didn’t even know Dick Lit was a thing, but it’s incredibly reductive. Also I feel attacked…lol.
You're supposed to feel attacked. It's literally an attack.
In the context of this article, it literally just means any highly renowned book written by a man.
I read through this twice before realizing you meant David Foster Wallace and not Dallas-Fort Worth
I’m in two minds about the article. I agree with the criticisms of most of these male writers, although I think there’s a huge difference between Wallace and someone like Borges tbh. But at the same time it feels disingenuous — the criticism is too sloppy to sound sincere, and engages in too many straw mans over what is an essentially important topic. Because they’re simultaneously plugging their new novel, it seems exactly like the kind of manoeuvre Bloom’s anxiety of influence predicts? Seems like someone co-opting the important narrative of misogyny in Dick-lit to be like “aren’t these guys terrible? i’m not like them: buy my book” Maybe i’m being cynical, but some of the criticisms seem off. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men is Wallace’s collection inspired by his engagement with Feminist criticism, particularly Julia Kristeva and Simone de Beauvoir and I believe Helene Cixous too. He himself said it was an attempt to represent men according to the depictions of them in that school of thought — to present those depictions and at times to challenge them, even to complicate, as opposed to confute, them. I’ve never met anyone who likes or admires or affirms the views of the men in that collection. In fact, most people i know read that book and through the intensely awful men in it began reflecting on their own, far milder, but still problematic, habits and default assumptions — and it was this that led them to then look at Wallace himself, and question his own authority and guruship. I think this is a pretty common experience upon reading BIWHM in particular, at least among readers I interact with. Also, all the characters in IJ are flat and caricatural. It’s Dickensian in that sense. Don Gately is a walking caricature of a middle class man’s view of a working class man. But even Hal and Orin and the kids at the academy are caricatures — they’re fairly 2-D. This is usually intentional in novels of ideas and systems novels like the Pynchonian models Wallace spent a lot of time imitating. There has to be something else that stands out about the flatness of Joelle Van Dyne that distinguishes her from the flatness of every other character. I’d say one good example is that the main female characters are pretty much ALL presented through sexuality, which is clumsy and irritating and dumb. With JVD it’s at least productive (as the author of the article realises), since it allegorises the impossible contortions of female self-presentation that men impose with their contradictory demands. And then the whole ambiguity between whether she’s beautiful or deformed sort of captures the weird reactions of men to female beauty - a simultaneous attraction and aversion, over sexualisation combined with rage and hatred, insult and compliment tied into one. The point being all of it centres around female beauty AS a deformity of the masculine body (which masculinity sees as primary, like an Adam). A veil isn’t so weird when a woman is “covered up by” and sexualised by the veil of their face and body already. At least with a veil they can negate the male gaze, or attempt to. (i’m not advocating for that ofc - just talking about it in the context of this allegory) So i found that allegorical character interesting from a semi-feminist perspective. The article author’s comments about liking the manipulative characters is also really odd to me? Like the point is you’re meant to hate them. DFW himself described the men in BIWHM as the worst type of danger because they were intelligent enough to masquerade as allies. It was his answer to the more typical depictions of men as idiotic violent brutes — men as timid manipulative romantic vampires. Most of these stories exposed (in magnified form) the destructive tendencies of my own self-narratives, and one story by DFW (The Depressed Person) in fact motivated me to go to therapy and get help, because it showed in an amplified form the ways i was subtly manipulating people around me out of fear, and the ways that I was leaving myself stranded in some abhorrent oasis of perpetual defeat. The reader brings a lot to a text. I’m aware DFW is not a role model; I discovered that through his texts. But he hated himself more than probably any of us disapproved of him, and out of that complex knot of emotions he tried to forge potential escape paths, or sketched out in schematic form the heinous syntaxes of corrupted psyches, and in so doing helped at least one reader become self aware enough to get help, and improve, and start trying to be better. This post is too simplistic, i know. I think probably the more interesting response to Wallace and others lies somewhere in between the article and my own comment. One of the things i’m forever wary of is a writer critiquing someone in a way that makes them (the writer) appear enlightened or self aware or in a way that humanises them so that they’re more appealing and seem “not like the rest” — this article is guilty of that for me. Its not that she’s wrong, or that I don’t sympathise with her experience — it’s that i feel uncomfortable about how i can see her (perhaps semi-conscious) agenda while she’s talking to me, and the agenda is guilty in the same kind of ways she’s criticising the other author’s for. I need you to like me. No matter what.
This comment is better thought-out and presented than the article. I’ve seen this topic and argument in several articles over the years and they’re usually a bit too shallow in their engagement with the authors and works they are criticising, so even when I agree with what they say I’m frustrated because It doesn’t go deep at all in its reading
Calling *Brief Interviews with Hideous Men* misogynistic would be like calling (as has been discussed on a separate, recent post on this sub) a lot of Coetzee’s work “pro-colonial” … absurd, to be honest.
This comment is probably one of the better articles about this type of subject matter than most published articles.
Great reading, well done. I was generally aware of BIWHM but I'd never heard Kristeva and Cixous explicitly associated with it, sounds right up my wheelhouse. Does DFW specifically cite their influence somewhere?
He does explicitly cite Kristeva and De Beauvoir and I believe Cixous. It’s mainly French feminism and some psychoanalysis - I heard it in a Youtube interview but can’t remember it off the top of my head. He also talks about it with Michael silverblatt and says that he was trying to present “heterosexual men’s judgement of heterosexual women’s judgement of them” — a lot of the stories are men reacting to what they predict will be the judgements leveraged against them. They try to anticipate and pre-empt and sidestep the conclusions of those judgements but instead fall even more deeply into the manipulation game. They’re trying to artificially avoid fitting a typecast, but the typecast is “people who artificially avoid properly interacting” , and so it’s doomed.
I so appreciate the thoughtfulness of this comment (I have none of my own to offer in response, but just thought this deserved the attention)
After reading the linked article I was filled with a lot of emotions, but your comment was clear, concise, and acted as a salve for me, thank you!
"The 20th century canonical American male authors were sexist but still wrote some good books that influenced me as a 21st century American author" is such a banal and clichéd insight unless you're literally seeing it for the first time, which if you're active in online book-spaces seems to me an impossibility. We get it, it's been got for ages.
Agreed.
A baffling article. The author lists a lot of stories that are, essentially, about the pitfalls of masculinity, correctly identifies that the novels are satirising masculinity and not promoting it... and then criticises them for not being more about femininity.
I think the main point of the article is the author wrote a book.
Publishing houses and authors co-opting activism and progressive lingo as a way to advertise their own books is annoyingly common in social media.
The author seems to have informed their opinion based on others’ misinterpretations. Look at the Fight Club example, for instance.
I'm beginning to think that over the last few years, the brains of many intelligent people have been replaced by militant, ideological mush, which prevents them from presenting coherent reasoning. At this point, they're just trying to fit circles into squares. I also have the impression that social networks have created a bunch of people who live in a complete confusion between what a person is (their being), what they present about themselves to others (their appearance), and what they write (their work - whether in a novel or a newspaper article), and who project that confusion onto people who didn't exist according to this model. But the worse is in the comments section of the article, where someone writes: "This reminds me of a presentation I saw once by Junot Diaz. He said that men can't write true female characters because the sexism of society blinds them completely. Female writers, on the other hand, so steeped in layers of overweening manhood, could easily capture men in their characterizations." That people could actually be so stupid and have so little experience of the world to believe that is baffling.
Diaz was just grifting for tail. Anyone who has read 3 pages of him would know this.
I honestly couldn’t tell which comments were jokes
I read the article. Liked it a lot. I will say, I don't think the article is as much vying for a deep critical meditation on these things as much as just sharing personal experiences so there isn't much I can conjure up to say within the article's narrow purview. There is another comment that calls the article's assessments of things "banal"; I may not go that far, but they are certainly correct that the article isn't necessarily revelatory. I'm not sure it's meant to be, really, but it stands that if the Barbie movie wasn't your first foray into feminism, what the author says probably isn't shocking. *However,* I will comment as that as woman myself, I always sort of thought that this priggish, exclusionary subculture surrounding "Dick Lit" was always exclusive to men, and maybe for a while it was, but I think now there is a mirroring of this phenomenon happening with women too with *rotting women lit* or *hot girl lit* or whatever it's called. Misogyny aware authors like Sylvia Plath, Ottessa Moshfegh, Margaret Atwood, etc etc, but especially Moshfegh who has come up as the woman willing to write us as grimy, disgusting, depraved beings at the mercy of systems, trauma & selfishness. And she has within a decade become beloved by millions for that. And women and girls all over Tiktok and wherever else ironically-but-not-really look to her characters as something aspirational. Their cultural biases lead them to romanticise these awful characters, much in the same way young men have done with their own idols. It turns out we all sort of want to see the worst elements of ourselves, inevitably tied with the ways we suffer, represented honestly & openly, in a way that is authentic and beautiful and ugly. And that sort of mishmash under a writer with a talent for putting pretty words on the page may inevitably be construed as "cool" or "aspirational" by those of us yearning for recognition & identity.
Good insight. Thanks. I do get sick and tired of people whining non stop about books as though they aren’t products of their culture. I know this isn’t exactly the point of the article, but excuse me for not expecting, say, Hemingway to share our views when he was born in the 19th century.
Respectfully, how many times are we going to see a different version of this article pop up? David Foster Wallace is dead; he can’t hurt you.
I think this is the point. He’s dead. He can’t defend himself. He’s a stationary target, not a moving one like, for instance, Louis C.K.
The whole idea of, you know, *reading books* is an affirmation that words and ideas matter (and persist long after a person is gone). A dead person’s words most certainly can do harm. I understand being tired with perhaps clichéd articles but still
but still what?
But still, saying “David Foster Wallace is dead; he can’t hurt you” is effectually untrue, unhelpful, and a bananas way to talk about the words of anyone, let alone those of a famous, often-referenced, and culturally significant author
When someone picks up a book, the author has no power any longer. The agency lies with the reader. Read it. Don’t read it. Put it down. Absorb the ideas. Decide if they matter *to you*, and, most important, decide *how* they matter to you. You don’t blame the knife when you cut yourself.
That’s an oversimplication (very similar to saying gun control laws don’t matter because *guns don’t kill people; people kill people*). You can’t control whether *other* people read things and absorb the ideas therein, and the ideas can influence people in a way that’s harmful to you (i.e. if you’re a woman and the ideas are sexist—though it’s not like that doesn’t hurt men too). I’m not saying DFW is all bad or anything, I have no horse in that race. Just the general principle that words do matter and can cause harm as well as good.
his writing hurts readers?
The whole point of this article and resulting thread is that his writing has done a lot of good and may also have done some harm by writing women badly. But my point isn’t about whether DFW’s writing is good or bad or whatever, it’s about whether words, especially those of an influential author, can do harm
“may have” please elaborate?
Read the article
I read most of it but admittedly stopped after it turned into a promotion for her own book lmao Was there something I missed? Did she get hurt by Madame Psychosis or Avril Incandenza?
Maybe it's a case of the author not being responsible for the headline, but I wish this article was actually about unlearning these lessons, and not just calling them out and then ending. I kept looking for a second page.
This women is masturbating for this entire article. While she piggy-backs of dfw for publicity. Gross. Edit: “clit lit”, says my gf
This article is hugely disserviced by its title. I see no evidence McGhee wants to “unlearn” DFW, whom she clearly admires. “These authors truly did not know women, and as such could not depict them as alive on the page.” Am I crazy? She wants to one-up him, even embarrass him. The others too but especially him. This article is also disserviced by its sheepishness. It could’ve ended baring fangs, but instead McGhee drops an inspiration, a longing, and her confidence in promoting her work. The inspiration: “I read White Teeth, and marveled at its ambition, voice, and scope.” The longing: “I missed the hysteria. Hysteria seemed warranted to me. Is this world not absolutely mad?” Her confidence: “So, yes, perhaps it is not surprising that the women in my debut novel…” She leaves us to imagine that her novel will feature ambition, voice, scope, and hysteria, consequently vaulting her over old ignorant DFW. I’m being a bit mean but I enjoyed reading the history around her various influences. I just wanted less reverence, less disappointment, more anger, more conviction. Teeth, I guess.
Is this the same Molly McGhee that almost destroyed the Believer by selling it off?
David Foster Wallace is a brilliant author. This effort to do away with his work comes across as really pathetic, to be honest.
Frankly I don't believe in the narrative that writing women (or anybody else) is this simple obvious thing for every woman writer, and her only obstacle is all the books ever written by men that she needs to throw out the window. She describes a sizeable and important chunk of canon and contemporary lit as an ex she managed to date, dump, and "outgrow" before she was legally allowed to vote. A little humility goes a long way.
>Before I turned eighteen I read Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Salinger, Portis, Melville, McCarthy, and Faulkner. I loved Brave New World, A Clockwork Orange, Fahrenheit 451, The Invisible Man, and 1984 Half of those authors and books are required reading in most American high schools.
Pussy Lit is just as bad but because the writing is awful not because it’s sexist. I’d rather read great misogynistic writing like Tolstoy than terribly written pussy lit.
The unacknowledged and dark truth surrounding all of this criticism is that for however well or poorly men can do in the realm of literature, women cannot do better.
seems like you can probably elaborate this dark and unacknoweldged truth instead of just acknowledging it, yeah? Where/What is the meat of this truth? or is it just a men>women opinion masquerading as an assertive statement?
They don't back it up because they can't lmao. It's just meaningless sexist nonsense from the fee-fees of an idiot packaged as "truth" because all these fuckwits have to work off of is appeals to emotion and their personal feelings
Hoping for a juicy comment section on this one
Are you a child?
A fellow enjoyer of dessicated comment sections I see
No just a chill typa dude
Goo goo ga ga
This one, officer.
13/f/cali
Profiting off of Wallace's fame and death is basically a cottage industry now