Beyond D.F. Wallace: Internet-conscious literature in the 2010s.

Abstract

David Foster Wallace saw the progressive cultural hegemony of television as detrimental both socially and artistically for human society, and called for a crucial overcoming of the values and aesthetics of high post-modernism which had failed, having been swallowed, assimilated and nullified by that very televisual world they sought in some way to criticize; most of all, irony, a sort of great invalidator of any criticism. Wallace believed the only solution was a return to a new sincerity – the artist as transparent, frail, weak, human again. But how has this fared for serious art so far, in the 2010s, in the age of the Internet 2.0? Isn’t irony once again one of the Internet’s main weapons of cultural hegemony? And hasn’t quite a lot of the school of new sincerity in Wallace’s wake (Franzen, Smith, Eggers) grown to live almost in a parallel dimension to the issue? Is there, ultimately, a heir of Wallace of sorts, who is problematizing in fiction the way the Internet is changing serious art, and how serious art should actively react?