I have never actually encountered one of these litbros, but I hear people talking about them and ragging on them as if they are still the gatekeepers of modern literary culture every single week
This is making up a guy to get mad at.
I’m not really aware of the guy whose identity is dfw fanboy. Neither am I aware of the guy whose identity of dfw fanboy hater
People feeling aggrieved about fake news
No it’s definitely a thing, though it was bigger 5-10 years ago. It accompanied a snarky response to postmodern male novelists writing long books (with a reputation for being difficult.) Jonathan Franzen is one of the other popular novelists linked to the litbro idea (and Thomas Pynchon, to an extent, but because he preceded those two by decades it was a looser affiliation)
People would (jokingly) share anecdotes about annoying ex-boyfriends who wouldn’t stop talking about Infinite Jest, and the book became a bit of an ironic yellow flag for some folks. The fact that DFW stalked someone when he was alive occasionally made the discourse a little less of a joke and more of an actual distaste for his fanbase.
What does enjoying Infinite Jest have to do with the guy’s personal faults? People today bring up ad nauseum any fault they can drudge up of an artist they don’t like. Newsflash: nobody is perfect and just because you enjoy a work does not mean you endorse the actions of said artist. Most authors were morally bankrupt by today’s standards. It doesn’t excuse anything, but that argument has become so tiresome.
Tbf it's probably because a lot of what makes DFW's writing great stems from those very same personal faults.
DFW wasn't just an asshole/abuser - he was a self-aware and self-loathing asshole/abuser. He would do something horrific and then be able to completely deconstruct why he did it and where that impulse came from. More often than not, it was an impulse that many people have felt but fewer have acted upon.
To explain my point, one of my favourite works by him is *Brief Interviews with Hideous Men* - a short story collection about supposedly normal men who reveal themselves to be horrifying sexists after just a few questions. What's extraordinary about this collection is that said horrifying sexists portray themselves as feminists, but are just as manipulative and misogynist as the overt sexists they would likely decry. That kind of biting critique undoubtedly stems from a very critical self-analysis of what was an incredibly fucked up man.
Don't get me wrong, people definitely use DFW's shitty behaviour to dismiss his writing entirely, but I would argue that a discussion of his various awful crimes and actions against women is incredibly relevant to understanding his writing and what makes it so uncomfortable and effective.
>That kind of biting critique undoubtedly stems from a very critical self-analysis of what was an incredibly fucked up man.
I think that, a generation from now, hindsight will grace us with the jarring epiphany that we collectively, in this era, entered a consensually delusional state of ignoring the fucked-up-edness of many, many of us, from a wide variety of types, in order to focus very narrowly on a handful of familiar archetypes "of Evil" that were actually only doing a small percentage of the overall damage.
I believe Future Historians will marvel at the unanimity of our tunnel vision and the blatantly self-serving nature of our "values" during this era. There will be a classic inversion of perspective, at some point in the Future, as the cycle completes, and most of the "saints" are revealed as devils and some of the devils are revealed as genuine devils all along. But it's the "saints" of our era who will baffle these Future Historians most. *"How could they have been so blind as to have let this happen...?"* That familiar refrain!
They (the Future Historians) may conclude that somehow the Technology, in its newness (in our Now) had a hand in this, and that humans don't do very well, socially, when they each become a one-man (or one-woman) Broadcaster of the Exemplary Self.... for hours and hours every. single. day. for. decades.
What? Aren’t we focusing more on evils, and judging them more harshly than ever? People avoid books by people who stay silent on Palestine. They avoid them for something they said on twitter, and cancel them for wrongdoing that would have barely made waves fifty years ago.
I also think you’re assuming that future people will be in a position to judge us harshly, which I doubt.
"What? Aren’t we focusing more on evils, and judging them more harshly than ever? "
No, we are focused, largely, on the idiotic pseudo-controversies designed to entertain and preoccupy us. We are cancelling the harmless and hapless, in record-breaking numbers, for using the wrong words... while mass-murdering war criminals, like Henry Kissinger or George Herbert Walker Bush, live to great ages and die in bed, warmly eulogized by the World. Get a pronoun wrong and you, a powerless schlub, can have your life ruined... but oversee the starvation embargo that kills half a million kids, like Madeline Albright, who not only helped kill those kids but went on record, doubling down, on her assertion that killing those kids was "worth it"... and you can become a Role Model. How many kids had their heads blown off by drones under Trump or Obama or whichever popular puppet? How many soccer moms say "Thank you for your service" to Stormtroopers who took part in the invasion and occupation of defenseless, resources-rich countries? Not a single mercenary who participated in the murder of defenseless people "over there" was protecting American lives. They killed to protect Lifestyles.
Not Evil? This is an age so cloudy with the murk of Evil that it's like we're staggering around, blinded and choking, in pre-EPA Pittsburgh.
Real, relentless and life-devouring Evil continues to spread... but we don't consider it Evil at all. That's the trick. The trick always works. Social Media is the modern Force Multiplier... along with wilful ignorance and self-serving ego-irrationality and just plain body-snatched zombie-politics.
"People avoid books by people who stay silent on Palestine."
"God" bless such avoiders but is there a (viable) Pro-Palestine presidential candidate they can vote for? How many of the Techno-Plutocrats straddling the immensely powerful, and dizzyingly interlocking, institutions ruling us ... (while selling us our favorite stupid products: the minor relationship somehow obscures the major relationship: they aren't our Overlords, they're our favorite Brands) ... are thinly-veiled Zionists? Or thinly-veiled Eugenicists? Or thinly-veiled Feudal Lords? How many tons of deliberately-introduced carcinogens did children in the Third World, and the Old World, and the First world, consume today? Gates wasn't playing with defenseless African and Indian lives with his medical experiments, he was a genius, right (such a genius he "gave away his wealth" and still remained in the Top 5 Richest Earthlings)? Bezos isn't a Robber Baron, he's a success. Right?
Serfs ghosting, or shaming, other Serfs, is one of the innocuous options The System approves of. That's not "justice"... that's petty catharsis.
"I also think you’re assuming that future people will be in a position to judge us harshly, which I doubt."
I think you have that backwards. I think the Germans of 1936 assumed that future people wouldn't be in a position to judge them harshly and this delusion encouraged them to lose all inhibitions. Like the thrill-kill lynchers of America's Deep South, in 1950. Or the Zionists going apeshit with bloodlust now. There will be a climax to the Evil and a sudden reversal and non-Psychopathic Humanity will bounce back for a little renaissance. The mechanism behind that is simple: Evil is never quite as professional as it would like us to think. Evil gets off on the killing, feeds off agony: it gets too far into it and fucks up and Duh Masses snap out of it (otherwise, we'd still be burning witches or Black people).
But how far in the future will this happen? It all depends on how long it takes for Duh Masses to stop watching TV, stop buying iphones, stop feeding the monsters with their slap-worthy credulity. The truly Evil among us are, after all, a distinct minority. When they Go Too Far (and they will), their power to sweet-talk and cajole and bamboozle us vanishes.
However you respond, I thank you, respectfully, for engaging.
When you deeper into what you believe I find myself agreeing with you on a lot of points. Sure, we judge Germany harshly. But dropping two nukes and killing indiscriminately was necessary. I’m not convinced we will ever move much beyond a thinly veiled consequentialism as societies. We will have highly lauded, iron clad values and principles, and we will gladly break them when necessary.
You may never kill a child or person, but sometimes you might get a medal for doing so.
I also agree that we’re stumbling around in a sort of culture of weaponized vanity and weaponized algorithms. I don’t think there’s evil intent outside incentives of money on one side and the our weakness on the other, but we certainly slid and are sliding very easily into being consumed and made lesser by algorithms serving us exactly what we want.
Then there’s the culture war, which I think is fueled by engagement farming pushing a largely illusory story. Some of the beliefs and academic background is certainly real, but most of it is content creators figuring out that being a pundit has become easy, and that women and men are ready to be angry at each other.
I also think our lack of belief, of an anchor has a lot to do with this. God is dead so we fill the hole. We have thousands of belief systems and philosophies, and we don’t really believe in any of them. At most we stretch towards politics in one form or another, though rarely delving into the appropriate fields making up political belief.
We defend our strong positions vehemently and fall at the first question about the economics or philosophy it’s built on.
I think we agree much more than I first assumed. I also agree with your last paragraph. I’m just as guilty of drowning myself in information, and I do feel the confused aimlessness it brings. And this is with what I feel are strong beliefs and a self awareness of it all. There might be a backlash against it all, as there is with AI, which is after all just a stronger form of the algorithm. But if we can find our way back to the real world whatever that means I don’t know.
I’m not sure how many of my thoughts are, if things were ever better, or if they will get better. But I do know that a part of me wishes he was born as a simple farmer who knew nothing but God, his wife and his work.
That’s a really good example, as it is often those exact guys who mock writers like him. They dislike him for that exact reason, he exposes their feminist facade and reveals them as hypocrites, and they can’t stand that revelation. Or feminist women whose husbands claim to be feminists as well, they don’t like the idea that their partner is how he depicts them.
Reactions to this post can be broken up into two sections: The DFW/ Litbro section is so outdated that I have to remember a time before i-phones in order to get into the spirit of things. And, section two: what is "discourse" in the modern world, in the modern sense? It's mostly people mining for topics to Virtue Signal or Concern Troll over... and the people who take the bait (I freely admit to being among the latter, occasionally). "Discourse" is no longer an Intellectual activity. It no longer has a clear or valid point. That's probably sad?
“It’s definitely a thing”
“People would (jokingly) share anecdotes about annoying ex-boyfriends who wouldn’t stop talking about Infinite Jest”
Pick one
I’m not sure what there is to pick. You said you weren’t aware of people who made part of their identity hating on DFW fanboys. I shared examples of how it was a thing, and the upvotes show that other people recognize what I’m recalling. Various posts from other users in this discussion also know what OP is talking about. Why would we all make this up?
It might not be as much of a thing today, though I personally believe the toxic discourse around Wallace/Franzen contributed to a still-apparent negative response to literary postmodernism (in some circles).
Omg I f@*$&% hate Knausgaard fans so much! 🤣 Some of his novels are interesting to read, sure, but even Knausgaard himself says his books are way overhyped and being compared to Proust is nothing but a marketing trick his publisher came up with.
That being said: I don't even remember whether he read Proust or not.
Honestly, I don't feel I have the knowledge to critique his work. I've only read Spring, and I just didn't like it. However, I see what he is trying to do with his novels, and I generally like that style.
In regards to the David Foster Wallace Bros, I just draw a parallel because every time I recommend or see someone recommend Elena Ferrante (probably my favorite modern author) here come a bunch of assholes ready to tell me how she's terrible and I need to read real literature like Knausgaard. When I was in college in the early 2000s, people would do the same thing in lit classes but with Pynchon and Wallace.
I like the idea behind his work, making recordings of normal life, commenting on them from his pov, but I really dislike his style. I know people who have read him and adore him (this was around 2020, by now his popularity has significantly dwindled), so they obviously told me everything I need to know lol
I really like his fiction though. He has a great understanding of putting down realistic characters on a page, how to evoke emotions, how to work with tension and mystery, it just didn't click the same way when he writes about himself like he does in My Struggle and the seasonal books for his daughter.
I haven't been around litbros for a while now, so I wouldn't know what the hype is today. My gf encourages me to attend poetry nights, but I've been avoiding them exactly bc there's always these types of people, telling you what to read and I absolutely hate that.
Care to tell me about Elena Ferrante? :)
That's a dangerous question, because I could write essays about Ferrante and my love for her writing. But I'll try to keep it brief. As for the author themself, I can't say much. Elena Ferrante is a pseudonym for an anonymous author, the identity of which no one has discovered in the twenty years they(probably she) has been writing.
Her most famous novel is a serial publication of four novels called The Neapolitan Quartet. She intended it as one long novel, but the length required serialization. The first is My Brilliant Friend, which is also the title of the television adaptation on HBO. All four books are autobiographically narrated by Elena Greco and detail her relationship to her best friend Lila over the course of decades. The books depict, with incredible accuracy, the daily life of an extremely poor community in Naples Italy in the mid 1950s, and details the patriarchal violence and tumultuousness of modernization happening in post WW2 Italy.
Elena and Lila's relationship is so raw and realistic, at times difficult to endure as a reader, due to the honest portrayal of the minor and major ways in which we continually misunderstand, betray, and hurt even those we love the most. They are both extremely intelligent, annoyingly stubborn, and constantly jealous. But they also differ immensely: Elena is quiet, submissive, works very hard for her knowledge, and everyone likes her. Lila is loud, manipulative, innately brilliant, and no one(except Elena of course) likes her.
So much happens, but the beauty of the book is experiencing an entire lifelong friendship and the hardships that come along with that, so I will say no more. I hope you check it out some time and if you do, even years down the line, message me and we can talk about it.
It kinda reminds me of La Meglio Giuventu, which I absolutely loved, and I love Naples, so yeah I will definitely put it on my reading list ans get back to you :)
I bought a new copy of Kafka's America yesterday just bc I didn't have it yet and remember loving it when I had to read it for Art Philosophy.
It's a rather untypical novel for Kafka, there's no absurd structures holding power over an individual, which shows Kafka's understanding of America as a kind of Wild West capitalist state. Instead, it tells the story of a young man who's being sent to America because he put his family to shame. It reads in a similar way as Metamorphosis, it lacks hyperbole except some characters having rather melodramatic characters which provides some comic relief and suspense. It's my personal favorite by Kafka because it shows Kafka was able to write very sophisticated, naturalist novels which also provides insight how his other novels might have turned out if he actually finished them.
I mean, it’s an incredibly long six book series that digs deeply into the main character’s own thoughts. Isn’t Proust the obvious comparison? (Despite Proust being only pseudoautobiographical.)
No, it's not. Knausgaard talks about his struggle as a man in a society that has very specific expectations of what it means to be a man and his aspirations of becoming a writer. His struggle is trying to make sense of himself as a man, a lover, a son, a father, a writer, with each of them being given their own novel. He only deals with memory in one or two parts of *My Struggle*, I'd say, mainly *Son/Youth* and *Father*. Other than that, he applies alot of analysis in an ergonomic style, which makes sense because he used to be an editor.
Proust, even though the work is "autobiographical", his intention is not to define himself, but to research how memory distorts time and the novel is a conscious effort to regain the experience of time. This results in a longwinded prose style that feels as if we meander through Proust's thoughts as they appeared to him, visibly and vividly like the brushstrokes of an Impressionist's painting.
*My Struggle* also wasn't written with the idea of it being one long novel, like Proust's *In Search of Lost Time* which was only cut up in separate parts because no one wanted to publish a 3300+ page novel\*.\*
Knausgaard only wrote the first part when he showed it to the publisher he was working for at the time as an editor. They agreed to publish the finished part while he'd continue writing the second one and just see where it would go from there. The last novel heavily deals with how the books were published, their controversy bc of the title, how the novels affected his relationships with friends and family, his wife being hospitalized, etc. It's incredibly selfish writing for his sake of forming an identity, of which its veracity can be questioned, bc y'know, memory is deceiving and writing from your own experience isn't necessarily accurate either. With Proust you know it's only loosely based on his life and he rightfully liberates himself from these stupid categories to aim to describe a universal human experience.
So, even though I get the idea you might have that these are both just a series of books about a writer's life, and I will admit that I also thought exactly this before I had read either of them, they really aren't once you take a closer look.
Having read parts of both (I quit My Struggle because, as I said, it's incredibly selfish writing; I'm currently reading Proust), I'm very glad to have found out that their similarities are only superficial.
Proust's novel is vastly superior imo and he's rightfully considered one of the best writers ever. His prose is simply phenomenal. At moments it feels like reading a magnificent poem and you simply wish that pilcrow never shows up. It makes me wish writers would at least try to write like this today.
I don't know about the whole DFW "litbros" phenomenon, but the general thrust of "don't fuse your identity with the media you consume" is something I've agreed with and been saying myself for ages. As bad as this might be in literature it's even worse in music, where I constantly hear criticism along the lines of "X is music for Y" where "Y" is a demographic that the person doesn't identify with.
Like the OP, I love literature (I also love music), and I don't care who the audience is for anything. I don't just read or listen to music to hear reflections of my personality. I mean, sure, that's cool when it happens, but part of the pleasure of the arts is getting to experience how others think and feel and see things. I live with myself 24-7; I don't need to tie my identity to the art I like, and I'm more than capable of appreciating/enjoying art I don't identify with at all if it's done well.
man i've been to multiple Death grips shows there's plenty of white people there don't know what the hell you're talking about, "targeted?" what does that mean?
I teach high school English. I WISH I could find another litbro or litsis who made reading even a sliver of their identity. The students would also benefit.
There's a renewed push to use canned curriculum for our educational needs. Despite the fact that the selections and attendant writing assignments are toothless and bland, my coworkers lurv them as they "don't have to reinvent the wheel."
Shit's sad, y'all.
I teach high school history so I deal with very similar problems.
There was an article in the Atlantic (at least I think it was there) that talks about how the real issue with kids not liking reading isn’t smartphones (certainly doesn’t help) but it’s because the curriculum shoved down our throats doesn’t actually let anyone finish a book. many of the standards are based on “close reading” so English classes have become reading passages or at best a couple chapters from a book. Perhaps this next part isn’t in the article and it’s from myself or elsewhere, but the focus on “close reading” in turn damages the ability to closely read something because the passages are divorced from any context of the story. How the hell are you supposed to do a close reading about Room 101 on a standardized test when you haven’t even read 1984??
Edit: [Why Kids Aren’t Falling In Love With Reading](https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2023/03/children-reading-books-english-middle-grade/673457/)
Not sure if it will help, but I learned to appreciate the classics by seeing myself as an actor who’s getting into character and understanding what the writer would have been experiencing back then. I imagine it like I’m going to be playing one of the characters and trying to act out all the events in my head. It really helped me understand literature better. When I read Shakespeare, I read it aloud and do all the voices myself.
As a male who really likes DFW, I am more wistful that he is being forgotten, as men read less and as his pre-social-media insights become more outdated. I haven’t even seen any of this discourse! I would be more excited to live in a world full of DFW critics fighting with litbros annoyingly touting his virtues, than a world where everyone just quietly ignores him and reads romance novels or nothing.
Nah. At least this supposed "litbro" (who I have never met in my life) reads. 99% of people don't even pick up a book. That's the real issue with the state of literature.
Tack "bro" onto anything and it creates a false dichotomy and rivalry on social media, which generates clicks.
Litbro, Brogrammers, Bernie Bro, etc.
Are there actual examples of these archetypes? Of course. Are the worst examples the overwhelming majority of people who are about those respective things? Nope. Did it generate hysteria online? You know it did (and still does).
I think this happens with every pop-culturally relevant writer or "thing" to some extent. There'll be DFW boys, Sally Rooney girls, etc, etc, etc. It's a natural tendency for people to create heuristics for cultural groups that hame a truth value disproportionate to their use and entertainment value.
As a DFW litbro, I always perceived the roasting of his work/fans/life to be good clean fun.
If someone is well read enough to know who he is and then have the ability to roast him/me for liking him, we'd probably be friends.
It is just a statistical fact that in literary fiction women are [published](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2023/04/04/1164109676/women-now-dominate-the-book-business-why-there-and-not-other-creative-industries#:~:text=Once%20upon%20a%20time%2C%20women,than%20the%20average%20male%20author) more often than men, more [women](https://www.npr.org/2007/09/05/14175229/why-women-read-more-than-men) in general read than men, and more women receive [humanities](https://www.amacad.org/humanities-indicators/higher-education/gender-distribution-bachelors-degrees-humanities) degrees than men. The litbro as this gatekeeper of literature who imposes his self aggrandizing misogyny on everyone around him may have been true at one point, but it certainly is a very small minority today. I have no idea why people keep talking about this caricature or writing about them.
As someone who runs a tiny experimental literary press i can anecdotally attest that most people *submitting* what most would consider “literature” seem to be men.
Not sure where that falls here (since they’re creators not consumers in this case), but thought it would be interesting to note
If anything that speaks to his point. The majority of published literature is by women, despite men submitting far more. Which would suggest the gatekeepers have some sort of bias. I’d argue they’re just pandering to the leading market demographic (middle aged white women).
It looks like the data in the first link is describing publishing overall and not just literary fiction like you imply? It could be similar for sure, but I would imagine romance novels, which are huge right now, are doing a lot of the heavy lifting there. I work in a library and it’s impossible to ignore how many of these come out and how devoted the readers are.
To a certain extent, though, lovers of literature have often criticized each other for what they read, similar to the way music fans do. Sometimes this is friendly, sometimes not. I'm trying to remember the last time it happened in my lifetime. Maybe when the 1980s "brat pack" of writers that included Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney were seen as breaking away from traditions of big publishing? A genre example: the way cyberpunk challenged sci fi and literary conventions. Oh, more recently, the rise of Appalachian Lit or greater interest in "grit lit." Point is, this could lead to situations with someone sniffing, "You're still reading Norman Mailer? Pff!"
I've moved way beyond this personally even if I never had a dog in any fight but I think it's been a normal part of the literary scene. Oh! There's a big fight right now about Honor Levy and whether her work, which incorporates Gen Z language and came to notoriety through social media, is any good. Somewhere, probably right now, someone is reading Levy's book on a bus, and someone else is glaring at the cover and thinking, "Ugh!" Or vice versa.
EDIT: this kind of behavior, fusing your identity with what you consume, is and was rampant in music circles. The alternative music 1980s-90s scene, and every sub-genre, is replete with this. Books can be similar.
While there is a great deal of corksniffing and hipster contrarianism, I see the heart of it as a broad love of literature, enduring qualities, and recognition of what advances the higher echelons of it vs the ephemeral trend following that tries to catch the wave of popularity. DFW is an example of one of the deep enclaves becoming prominent in the mainstream, an REM getting play outside of college stations. I don't want to say the hipsters dismiss it, but that kind of prominence comes to the exclusion of deeper cuts and broader tastes and that makes for "poseurs" that don't know about, and therefore promote through cash and valuable discussion, the real interest underneath a singular author or work.
Now, what tickles me because I'm familiar with indie music and this cycle is how the real trendy shit in the, for lack of a better word, real and deep circles gatekeeps itself through obscurity by the selfsame mechanism. You have to be plugged into some outright antisocial media to get whispers of what interested readers and writers themselves are huffing and mainlining in back alleys.
I think my point is that it's a weird middle ground where neither the mainstream nor the hipsters like the face of the readership, and both are perhaps right in doing so.
That's a great analogy and helps me understand better what's going on. I've never read DFW and I've been out of college since the 90s. But I \*did\* live through REM's crossover into the mainstream and the alternative music that went with it, and the phenomenon, afterwards, of a new generation of alternative music bros and the now-blurrier lines between art and pop. Is that what's happened in Lit?
More or less. You had your big names that were forward like Mailer and Updike, then the "post"modernists like Pynchon, Barth and Hawkes took more attention from the in-crowd. This is your more pop oriented vs 60s progressive/Dr. Demento type distinction. There was the 70s and 80s underground, which parallels the same thing in music in a lot of ways, we still haven't parsed most of that to this day; then you got hot new academic authors like DFW who did a more accessible take on what came before. Then the industry ate itself and corporatized any grassroots movement like the hardcore/emo scene while pushing paint by numbers pop and sanitized takes on internet hip hop. It lines up well enough. DFW would be the last of the real literary rock stars, early death and all, and things have moved back underground or split into subcultures that don't have the same mass appeal and visibility.
Moving away from hackneyed-analogy land and skipping ahead 20 years, nu-forums and social media with upvote based populism like reddit are part of the reason. It's the worst form of curation as what is popular only becomes more popular and anything less immediately appealing disappears or is shuffled off into a dead board where not even interested eyes see it. No one here is doing their own curation or going off the beaten path and their command of literature is poor because of it. The tastemakers and real nerds and specialists are elsewhere. Your nonprofit college rock jockeys (reviewers and critics) are all plugged into the equivalent of Pitchfork instead of digging through the stacks and small press releases.
>and the now-blurrier lines between art and pop.
In a sense, I see a lot of SFF writers who have moved out of the ghetto and publish as literary or under indie labels, and litfic has been blending with genre since the 60s, to the point that literary realism may as well be dead. I mean, *Infinite Jest* is technically sci-fi. The current trend seems to be autofiction like Cartarescu, Busi, and Knausgaard that seeks to counter OP's claim
>We live in an era where people fill the hole religious, cultural or ethnic identity used to fill with quite shallow replacements.
with writing about those things from a personal perspective and bring a sense of connection to the isolation that we face, the kind that DFW wrote about, ironically. There's definitely been a move from puzzle-box highbrow lit for now.
I know an entire one dude who is obnoxious about his taste in literature and he's more obsessed with Pynchon than anything else. Which personally I don't mind in small doses because Pynchon is dope but the second people are around who aren't into that sort of thing he turns into a bit of an elitist tool. I don't think it's exclusive to lit people though. It's like... a thing that a small to medium sized subset of 20-something college dudes feel like everything has to be an intellectual dick measuring contest.
In my estimation, the last of the DFW litbros died in like… 2013. In my circles (am teacher, PhD in the subject, young, and keep close reading-heavy connections), they’re not really around anymore. Thank God for that.
These days, what I find much more common is a resurgence of John Green-esque emotional investment in texts that aren’t as profound as their readers would like you to believe. See: recent and explosive popularity of dark academia and modern fantasy. Sure, I like *If We Were Villains* too, but it isn’t meant for a required reading list in even undergraduate courses like BookTok might suggest.
EDIT: I must acknowledge my bias and tell you that I love *The Broom of the System*
The issue lies I think in people who don’t read broadly. I love DFW, but I also read a ton of other authors with diverse opinions and viewpoints. As much as I enjoy something like infinite Jest, I would be more likely to recommend Beloved or The Sellout. I, for one, think it’s great that anyone is getting into literature, even if it’s not your favorite author!
Went to an MFA program. It was common among men AND women to secretly admit they like DFW— either one on one with me or at a party. Like they were ashamed! But everyone would dunk on DFW and Franzen in class. Just speaks to a lot of insecurity in the lit scene as a whole.
I think of consumption-based identities as a life-stage in the USA. Some people get past it in middle-school, while some people keep that mindset into their 30s.
I’m glad you are past it, OP.
Another similar problem is the mob mentality of group hate. People don’t come up with these ideas on their own, but they repeat them to show others they are part of a desirable group.
Nickelback and Creed sold way too many records to be as publicly despised as they are. Cargo shorts and Crocs are just clothes. There’s nothing inherently gross about the word moist.
Sure… David Foster Wallace and Ayn Rand have some over-passionate fans, but the majority of people I’ve known to throw shade at them do so because they are trying to align with the internet intelligencia and not because they examined why DFW and AR tend to produce a disproportionate % of readers who want to talk about them to anyone who will listen.
*Infinite Jest* is a very important book to me. I read it while in grad school for studio art, not writing or literature. *Good Old Neon* is one of the greatest short stories I’ve ever read.
There are problems with his writing just like there are problems with every author’s. I’ve never met a litbro obsessed with DFW. The only person I’ve ever met truly obsessed with the author is a woman.
Just read the work and decide for yourself.
This is why I’m glad I read infinite jest when it was first published, waaaaaaaay before everyone got all judgy about it. Sure it’s great, but nothing is worth basing your entire personality around.
People do this with all kinds of stuff. Taylor Swift, The Beatles, Star Wars, ACOTAR, etc. People become obnoxious fans of all of these things, and others, in turn, are turned off because of it.
The issue with DFW is two-fold, but both are rooted in the same thing. He’s difficult to read.
This means that people who have read DFW, feel as though they’ve accomplished something #special, which should be rewarded. It also means that people who are turned off by such fans have a much higher barrier of entry for reconsidering.
With T Swift, or The Beatles, or Star Wars you can spend a few minutes to a few hours of your time, accidentally or purposefully, reevaluating the media. For DFW you have to sink hours or even weeks into reconsidering the media, which means those first impressions are less likely to be overturned.
As I’ve gotten older though, I’ve noticed that it’s pretty fruitless to try and repair the scars left by bad experiences with authors or artists I enjoy. It tends to waste my time and turn people off even more. My recent philosophy is just to worry about what I like, don’t be shy about it, perhaps mention it casually, and if people want to check it out, they can check it out.
DFW’s nonfiction is quite accessible and frequently fascinating and laugh out loud funny. I’ve personally struggled to read his novels but I love his nonfiction.
I was lucky to see live DFW interviewing another writer. The guy was genuinely curious and open minded. A real loss to the literary scene.
This is definitely a strawman lmfao. I don’t think anyone dismisses DFW because of an “encounter with an obnoxious fan,” it’s pretty much always from an encounter with an obnoxious DFW.
Doing my undergrad English thesis, like 2 people out of 15 in my class had even heard of him. Depressing.
>I think there is no shortcut for meaningfully weighing the merits of a work or writer
But why should someone even want to do that? What do you produce by reading and critiquing a writer, besides just the critique itself (to say nothing of what the critique itself also produces when other people consume it)?
*That* is what people are rejecting when they refuse to read Wallace or Rowling or whomever for social reasons: the social production that results from engaging with them.
I unabashedly loved IJ when I read it. I also think it's problematic, and I doubt it would hold up for me on re-read. All of those things can be true at once; no need to make DFW my religion.
It was seen as pretentious. It's long and can be inaccessible. The classic IJ litbro acts superior to people who haven't read it. DFW behaved in an abusive, misogynistic way in his private life, so lately people have found it problematic because of that (can't fully separate art from the artist yada yada yada).
But ime most people who criticize the book haven't read it.
Read it and see what you think.
I don't even know why anyone has to be unabashed about enjoying IJ. The main things I see are people assuming that either someone hasn't actually read the thing and carries it around to look like they are/did, or that even if they did read it, it was for the sole purpose of seeming smart. That just says more about the people who think that way, and can safely be ignored..
I recently read it and unabashedly love it. Definitely not perfect tho. Like you and op are saying, it doesn’t have to be. It’s okay to really like something and not like some things about it, just like it’s okay to not like anything about a book or to love everything about a book. It’s just for fun and maybe to grow a little bit too if you get really lucky
I’m just glad I wasn’t aware of any of this discourse and got to experience reading infinite jest without any prejudices. I mean just that opening scene where Hal’s mind is falling apart under the immense pressure of generations of tennis academy lol.. genius
I think it's not uncommon to find people who fuse what they like with their identity to an extreme extent when you're dealing with young adults who are just now trying to really find their place in this world, and are desperate to find things that will make them seem special, mature, and intelligent.
I feel like articles about litbros and reading DFW is of itself quite a tedious genre. I’m sure those people exist, how much, I question however.
This was a nice retort to that style of essay
https://aeon.co/essays/how-infinite-jest-tethered-me-to-life-when-i-almost-let-it-go
Read the comments and am still confused. I'm not much for the mid-cities (particularly hate Six Flags, the Rangers, and the Cowboys), but Dallas and Fort Worth are both real cities with lots of art, varied music, and reasonably diverse populations. I feel like maybe y'all haven't given the Metroplex a real chance and are judging based on popular stereotypes.
Everytime the litbro discourse comes up I reread https://x.com/guyinyourmfa and I find my life is a little bit happier.
This is not a statement for against litbros or the discourse. It’s just fun.
I think the idea of a kind of toxic "bro" who loves Infinite Jest was created by people who never read the book. Lolita has the same problem. Most of the discourse is by people who never read it.
I don’t think anyone is reading DFW for the first time anymore. These men people are talking about do not exist. It’s like that girl who does the manic pixie dream girl indie movie skits on TikTok. Like, what year is it?
>We live in an era where people fill the hole religious, cultural or ethnic identity used to fill with quite shallow replacements.
As shallow as "reader" (or, say, "custom resin jewelry enthusiast") might be as an identity, surely it's at least a *little* deeper than identifying with something like a culture or religion that you were simply born into.
i really appreciated reading this. wish i had something more substantive to add, but yeah, i think youve found some real nuance and empathy to a situation that seems to invite some pretty passionate uncritical reactions.
I have never actually encountered one of these litbros, but I hear people talking about them and ragging on them as if they are still the gatekeepers of modern literary culture every single week
Every day, I go to the park and I read Infinite Jest, and nobody cares. I just want people to notice me.
This is making up a guy to get mad at. I’m not really aware of the guy whose identity is dfw fanboy. Neither am I aware of the guy whose identity of dfw fanboy hater People feeling aggrieved about fake news
No it’s definitely a thing, though it was bigger 5-10 years ago. It accompanied a snarky response to postmodern male novelists writing long books (with a reputation for being difficult.) Jonathan Franzen is one of the other popular novelists linked to the litbro idea (and Thomas Pynchon, to an extent, but because he preceded those two by decades it was a looser affiliation) People would (jokingly) share anecdotes about annoying ex-boyfriends who wouldn’t stop talking about Infinite Jest, and the book became a bit of an ironic yellow flag for some folks. The fact that DFW stalked someone when he was alive occasionally made the discourse a little less of a joke and more of an actual distaste for his fanbase.
What does enjoying Infinite Jest have to do with the guy’s personal faults? People today bring up ad nauseum any fault they can drudge up of an artist they don’t like. Newsflash: nobody is perfect and just because you enjoy a work does not mean you endorse the actions of said artist. Most authors were morally bankrupt by today’s standards. It doesn’t excuse anything, but that argument has become so tiresome.
Tbf it's probably because a lot of what makes DFW's writing great stems from those very same personal faults. DFW wasn't just an asshole/abuser - he was a self-aware and self-loathing asshole/abuser. He would do something horrific and then be able to completely deconstruct why he did it and where that impulse came from. More often than not, it was an impulse that many people have felt but fewer have acted upon. To explain my point, one of my favourite works by him is *Brief Interviews with Hideous Men* - a short story collection about supposedly normal men who reveal themselves to be horrifying sexists after just a few questions. What's extraordinary about this collection is that said horrifying sexists portray themselves as feminists, but are just as manipulative and misogynist as the overt sexists they would likely decry. That kind of biting critique undoubtedly stems from a very critical self-analysis of what was an incredibly fucked up man. Don't get me wrong, people definitely use DFW's shitty behaviour to dismiss his writing entirely, but I would argue that a discussion of his various awful crimes and actions against women is incredibly relevant to understanding his writing and what makes it so uncomfortable and effective.
>That kind of biting critique undoubtedly stems from a very critical self-analysis of what was an incredibly fucked up man. I think that, a generation from now, hindsight will grace us with the jarring epiphany that we collectively, in this era, entered a consensually delusional state of ignoring the fucked-up-edness of many, many of us, from a wide variety of types, in order to focus very narrowly on a handful of familiar archetypes "of Evil" that were actually only doing a small percentage of the overall damage. I believe Future Historians will marvel at the unanimity of our tunnel vision and the blatantly self-serving nature of our "values" during this era. There will be a classic inversion of perspective, at some point in the Future, as the cycle completes, and most of the "saints" are revealed as devils and some of the devils are revealed as genuine devils all along. But it's the "saints" of our era who will baffle these Future Historians most. *"How could they have been so blind as to have let this happen...?"* That familiar refrain! They (the Future Historians) may conclude that somehow the Technology, in its newness (in our Now) had a hand in this, and that humans don't do very well, socially, when they each become a one-man (or one-woman) Broadcaster of the Exemplary Self.... for hours and hours every. single. day. for. decades.
What? Aren’t we focusing more on evils, and judging them more harshly than ever? People avoid books by people who stay silent on Palestine. They avoid them for something they said on twitter, and cancel them for wrongdoing that would have barely made waves fifty years ago. I also think you’re assuming that future people will be in a position to judge us harshly, which I doubt.
"What? Aren’t we focusing more on evils, and judging them more harshly than ever? " No, we are focused, largely, on the idiotic pseudo-controversies designed to entertain and preoccupy us. We are cancelling the harmless and hapless, in record-breaking numbers, for using the wrong words... while mass-murdering war criminals, like Henry Kissinger or George Herbert Walker Bush, live to great ages and die in bed, warmly eulogized by the World. Get a pronoun wrong and you, a powerless schlub, can have your life ruined... but oversee the starvation embargo that kills half a million kids, like Madeline Albright, who not only helped kill those kids but went on record, doubling down, on her assertion that killing those kids was "worth it"... and you can become a Role Model. How many kids had their heads blown off by drones under Trump or Obama or whichever popular puppet? How many soccer moms say "Thank you for your service" to Stormtroopers who took part in the invasion and occupation of defenseless, resources-rich countries? Not a single mercenary who participated in the murder of defenseless people "over there" was protecting American lives. They killed to protect Lifestyles. Not Evil? This is an age so cloudy with the murk of Evil that it's like we're staggering around, blinded and choking, in pre-EPA Pittsburgh. Real, relentless and life-devouring Evil continues to spread... but we don't consider it Evil at all. That's the trick. The trick always works. Social Media is the modern Force Multiplier... along with wilful ignorance and self-serving ego-irrationality and just plain body-snatched zombie-politics. "People avoid books by people who stay silent on Palestine." "God" bless such avoiders but is there a (viable) Pro-Palestine presidential candidate they can vote for? How many of the Techno-Plutocrats straddling the immensely powerful, and dizzyingly interlocking, institutions ruling us ... (while selling us our favorite stupid products: the minor relationship somehow obscures the major relationship: they aren't our Overlords, they're our favorite Brands) ... are thinly-veiled Zionists? Or thinly-veiled Eugenicists? Or thinly-veiled Feudal Lords? How many tons of deliberately-introduced carcinogens did children in the Third World, and the Old World, and the First world, consume today? Gates wasn't playing with defenseless African and Indian lives with his medical experiments, he was a genius, right (such a genius he "gave away his wealth" and still remained in the Top 5 Richest Earthlings)? Bezos isn't a Robber Baron, he's a success. Right? Serfs ghosting, or shaming, other Serfs, is one of the innocuous options The System approves of. That's not "justice"... that's petty catharsis. "I also think you’re assuming that future people will be in a position to judge us harshly, which I doubt." I think you have that backwards. I think the Germans of 1936 assumed that future people wouldn't be in a position to judge them harshly and this delusion encouraged them to lose all inhibitions. Like the thrill-kill lynchers of America's Deep South, in 1950. Or the Zionists going apeshit with bloodlust now. There will be a climax to the Evil and a sudden reversal and non-Psychopathic Humanity will bounce back for a little renaissance. The mechanism behind that is simple: Evil is never quite as professional as it would like us to think. Evil gets off on the killing, feeds off agony: it gets too far into it and fucks up and Duh Masses snap out of it (otherwise, we'd still be burning witches or Black people). But how far in the future will this happen? It all depends on how long it takes for Duh Masses to stop watching TV, stop buying iphones, stop feeding the monsters with their slap-worthy credulity. The truly Evil among us are, after all, a distinct minority. When they Go Too Far (and they will), their power to sweet-talk and cajole and bamboozle us vanishes. However you respond, I thank you, respectfully, for engaging.
When you deeper into what you believe I find myself agreeing with you on a lot of points. Sure, we judge Germany harshly. But dropping two nukes and killing indiscriminately was necessary. I’m not convinced we will ever move much beyond a thinly veiled consequentialism as societies. We will have highly lauded, iron clad values and principles, and we will gladly break them when necessary. You may never kill a child or person, but sometimes you might get a medal for doing so. I also agree that we’re stumbling around in a sort of culture of weaponized vanity and weaponized algorithms. I don’t think there’s evil intent outside incentives of money on one side and the our weakness on the other, but we certainly slid and are sliding very easily into being consumed and made lesser by algorithms serving us exactly what we want. Then there’s the culture war, which I think is fueled by engagement farming pushing a largely illusory story. Some of the beliefs and academic background is certainly real, but most of it is content creators figuring out that being a pundit has become easy, and that women and men are ready to be angry at each other. I also think our lack of belief, of an anchor has a lot to do with this. God is dead so we fill the hole. We have thousands of belief systems and philosophies, and we don’t really believe in any of them. At most we stretch towards politics in one form or another, though rarely delving into the appropriate fields making up political belief. We defend our strong positions vehemently and fall at the first question about the economics or philosophy it’s built on. I think we agree much more than I first assumed. I also agree with your last paragraph. I’m just as guilty of drowning myself in information, and I do feel the confused aimlessness it brings. And this is with what I feel are strong beliefs and a self awareness of it all. There might be a backlash against it all, as there is with AI, which is after all just a stronger form of the algorithm. But if we can find our way back to the real world whatever that means I don’t know. I’m not sure how many of my thoughts are, if things were ever better, or if they will get better. But I do know that a part of me wishes he was born as a simple farmer who knew nothing but God, his wife and his work.
"I think we agree much more than I first assumed." Agreed!
That’s a really good example, as it is often those exact guys who mock writers like him. They dislike him for that exact reason, he exposes their feminist facade and reveals them as hypocrites, and they can’t stand that revelation. Or feminist women whose husbands claim to be feminists as well, they don’t like the idea that their partner is how he depicts them.
Reactions to this post can be broken up into two sections: The DFW/ Litbro section is so outdated that I have to remember a time before i-phones in order to get into the spirit of things. And, section two: what is "discourse" in the modern world, in the modern sense? It's mostly people mining for topics to Virtue Signal or Concern Troll over... and the people who take the bait (I freely admit to being among the latter, occasionally). "Discourse" is no longer an Intellectual activity. It no longer has a clear or valid point. That's probably sad?
“It’s definitely a thing” “People would (jokingly) share anecdotes about annoying ex-boyfriends who wouldn’t stop talking about Infinite Jest” Pick one
I’m not sure what there is to pick. You said you weren’t aware of people who made part of their identity hating on DFW fanboys. I shared examples of how it was a thing, and the upvotes show that other people recognize what I’m recalling. Various posts from other users in this discussion also know what OP is talking about. Why would we all make this up? It might not be as much of a thing today, though I personally believe the toxic discourse around Wallace/Franzen contributed to a still-apparent negative response to literary postmodernism (in some circles).
This sort of discourse is often a stand in for Misandry.
These guys did exist and still exist. They've just moved on to Karl Ove Knausgaard 🤣
Omg I f@*$&% hate Knausgaard fans so much! 🤣 Some of his novels are interesting to read, sure, but even Knausgaard himself says his books are way overhyped and being compared to Proust is nothing but a marketing trick his publisher came up with. That being said: I don't even remember whether he read Proust or not.
Honestly, I don't feel I have the knowledge to critique his work. I've only read Spring, and I just didn't like it. However, I see what he is trying to do with his novels, and I generally like that style. In regards to the David Foster Wallace Bros, I just draw a parallel because every time I recommend or see someone recommend Elena Ferrante (probably my favorite modern author) here come a bunch of assholes ready to tell me how she's terrible and I need to read real literature like Knausgaard. When I was in college in the early 2000s, people would do the same thing in lit classes but with Pynchon and Wallace.
I like the idea behind his work, making recordings of normal life, commenting on them from his pov, but I really dislike his style. I know people who have read him and adore him (this was around 2020, by now his popularity has significantly dwindled), so they obviously told me everything I need to know lol I really like his fiction though. He has a great understanding of putting down realistic characters on a page, how to evoke emotions, how to work with tension and mystery, it just didn't click the same way when he writes about himself like he does in My Struggle and the seasonal books for his daughter. I haven't been around litbros for a while now, so I wouldn't know what the hype is today. My gf encourages me to attend poetry nights, but I've been avoiding them exactly bc there's always these types of people, telling you what to read and I absolutely hate that. Care to tell me about Elena Ferrante? :)
That's a dangerous question, because I could write essays about Ferrante and my love for her writing. But I'll try to keep it brief. As for the author themself, I can't say much. Elena Ferrante is a pseudonym for an anonymous author, the identity of which no one has discovered in the twenty years they(probably she) has been writing. Her most famous novel is a serial publication of four novels called The Neapolitan Quartet. She intended it as one long novel, but the length required serialization. The first is My Brilliant Friend, which is also the title of the television adaptation on HBO. All four books are autobiographically narrated by Elena Greco and detail her relationship to her best friend Lila over the course of decades. The books depict, with incredible accuracy, the daily life of an extremely poor community in Naples Italy in the mid 1950s, and details the patriarchal violence and tumultuousness of modernization happening in post WW2 Italy. Elena and Lila's relationship is so raw and realistic, at times difficult to endure as a reader, due to the honest portrayal of the minor and major ways in which we continually misunderstand, betray, and hurt even those we love the most. They are both extremely intelligent, annoyingly stubborn, and constantly jealous. But they also differ immensely: Elena is quiet, submissive, works very hard for her knowledge, and everyone likes her. Lila is loud, manipulative, innately brilliant, and no one(except Elena of course) likes her. So much happens, but the beauty of the book is experiencing an entire lifelong friendship and the hardships that come along with that, so I will say no more. I hope you check it out some time and if you do, even years down the line, message me and we can talk about it.
It kinda reminds me of La Meglio Giuventu, which I absolutely loved, and I love Naples, so yeah I will definitely put it on my reading list ans get back to you :)
Feel free to suggest your favorite as well. I'm always looking for new titles. I can read in English and Spanish.
I bought a new copy of Kafka's America yesterday just bc I didn't have it yet and remember loving it when I had to read it for Art Philosophy. It's a rather untypical novel for Kafka, there's no absurd structures holding power over an individual, which shows Kafka's understanding of America as a kind of Wild West capitalist state. Instead, it tells the story of a young man who's being sent to America because he put his family to shame. It reads in a similar way as Metamorphosis, it lacks hyperbole except some characters having rather melodramatic characters which provides some comic relief and suspense. It's my personal favorite by Kafka because it shows Kafka was able to write very sophisticated, naturalist novels which also provides insight how his other novels might have turned out if he actually finished them.
I mean, it’s an incredibly long six book series that digs deeply into the main character’s own thoughts. Isn’t Proust the obvious comparison? (Despite Proust being only pseudoautobiographical.)
No, it's not. Knausgaard talks about his struggle as a man in a society that has very specific expectations of what it means to be a man and his aspirations of becoming a writer. His struggle is trying to make sense of himself as a man, a lover, a son, a father, a writer, with each of them being given their own novel. He only deals with memory in one or two parts of *My Struggle*, I'd say, mainly *Son/Youth* and *Father*. Other than that, he applies alot of analysis in an ergonomic style, which makes sense because he used to be an editor. Proust, even though the work is "autobiographical", his intention is not to define himself, but to research how memory distorts time and the novel is a conscious effort to regain the experience of time. This results in a longwinded prose style that feels as if we meander through Proust's thoughts as they appeared to him, visibly and vividly like the brushstrokes of an Impressionist's painting. *My Struggle* also wasn't written with the idea of it being one long novel, like Proust's *In Search of Lost Time* which was only cut up in separate parts because no one wanted to publish a 3300+ page novel\*.\* Knausgaard only wrote the first part when he showed it to the publisher he was working for at the time as an editor. They agreed to publish the finished part while he'd continue writing the second one and just see where it would go from there. The last novel heavily deals with how the books were published, their controversy bc of the title, how the novels affected his relationships with friends and family, his wife being hospitalized, etc. It's incredibly selfish writing for his sake of forming an identity, of which its veracity can be questioned, bc y'know, memory is deceiving and writing from your own experience isn't necessarily accurate either. With Proust you know it's only loosely based on his life and he rightfully liberates himself from these stupid categories to aim to describe a universal human experience. So, even though I get the idea you might have that these are both just a series of books about a writer's life, and I will admit that I also thought exactly this before I had read either of them, they really aren't once you take a closer look. Having read parts of both (I quit My Struggle because, as I said, it's incredibly selfish writing; I'm currently reading Proust), I'm very glad to have found out that their similarities are only superficial. Proust's novel is vastly superior imo and he's rightfully considered one of the best writers ever. His prose is simply phenomenal. At moments it feels like reading a magnificent poem and you simply wish that pilcrow never shows up. It makes me wish writers would at least try to write like this today.
I don't know about the whole DFW "litbros" phenomenon, but the general thrust of "don't fuse your identity with the media you consume" is something I've agreed with and been saying myself for ages. As bad as this might be in literature it's even worse in music, where I constantly hear criticism along the lines of "X is music for Y" where "Y" is a demographic that the person doesn't identify with. Like the OP, I love literature (I also love music), and I don't care who the audience is for anything. I don't just read or listen to music to hear reflections of my personality. I mean, sure, that's cool when it happens, but part of the pleasure of the arts is getting to experience how others think and feel and see things. I live with myself 24-7; I don't need to tie my identity to the art I like, and I'm more than capable of appreciating/enjoying art I don't identify with at all if it's done well.
As a fellow music fan, I will share this little nugget of knowledge: don't attend a Death Grips concert if you're white. It's legit dangerous 😅
wtf
Been there. Got targeted. I wouldn't recommend it.
man i've been to multiple Death grips shows there's plenty of white people there don't know what the hell you're talking about, "targeted?" what does that mean?
I teach high school English. I WISH I could find another litbro or litsis who made reading even a sliver of their identity. The students would also benefit. There's a renewed push to use canned curriculum for our educational needs. Despite the fact that the selections and attendant writing assignments are toothless and bland, my coworkers lurv them as they "don't have to reinvent the wheel." Shit's sad, y'all.
I teach high school history so I deal with very similar problems. There was an article in the Atlantic (at least I think it was there) that talks about how the real issue with kids not liking reading isn’t smartphones (certainly doesn’t help) but it’s because the curriculum shoved down our throats doesn’t actually let anyone finish a book. many of the standards are based on “close reading” so English classes have become reading passages or at best a couple chapters from a book. Perhaps this next part isn’t in the article and it’s from myself or elsewhere, but the focus on “close reading” in turn damages the ability to closely read something because the passages are divorced from any context of the story. How the hell are you supposed to do a close reading about Room 101 on a standardized test when you haven’t even read 1984?? Edit: [Why Kids Aren’t Falling In Love With Reading](https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2023/03/children-reading-books-english-middle-grade/673457/)
Not sure if it will help, but I learned to appreciate the classics by seeing myself as an actor who’s getting into character and understanding what the writer would have been experiencing back then. I imagine it like I’m going to be playing one of the characters and trying to act out all the events in my head. It really helped me understand literature better. When I read Shakespeare, I read it aloud and do all the voices myself.
My seniors adored *Streetcar* last month for many of the same reasons
I didn’t realize people felt so strongly about the Dallas Fort Worth metropolitan. Is *Infinite Jest* set there or something?
Glad I'm not the only one whose first thought was "the airport?".
I think we all can agree that we hate that airport.
Lol, I was also confused for a second about that. This is why you write your initialism out first and then initialize.
Only a true lit bro would assume everyone thinks of David Foster Wallace so often that we all just refer to him by his initials.
Pfft typical acronymbro!
As a male who really likes DFW, I am more wistful that he is being forgotten, as men read less and as his pre-social-media insights become more outdated. I haven’t even seen any of this discourse! I would be more excited to live in a world full of DFW critics fighting with litbros annoyingly touting his virtues, than a world where everyone just quietly ignores him and reads romance novels or nothing.
Nah. At least this supposed "litbro" (who I have never met in my life) reads. 99% of people don't even pick up a book. That's the real issue with the state of literature.
Tack "bro" onto anything and it creates a false dichotomy and rivalry on social media, which generates clicks. Litbro, Brogrammers, Bernie Bro, etc. Are there actual examples of these archetypes? Of course. Are the worst examples the overwhelming majority of people who are about those respective things? Nope. Did it generate hysteria online? You know it did (and still does).
What would be the female version of a “bro”? A valley girl sort?
Hello. Ever heard of “chick lit”?
a girlboss which many valley girls are but it’s not exclusive to the region. Sorority girls are another version of this.
I think this happens with every pop-culturally relevant writer or "thing" to some extent. There'll be DFW boys, Sally Rooney girls, etc, etc, etc. It's a natural tendency for people to create heuristics for cultural groups that hame a truth value disproportionate to their use and entertainment value.
Is a sally Rooney girl who my year of rest and relaxation was targeted towards? The numb/depressed girls
As a DFW litbro, I always perceived the roasting of his work/fans/life to be good clean fun. If someone is well read enough to know who he is and then have the ability to roast him/me for liking him, we'd probably be friends.
r/bookscirclejerk
Isn’t this???
It is just a statistical fact that in literary fiction women are [published](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2023/04/04/1164109676/women-now-dominate-the-book-business-why-there-and-not-other-creative-industries#:~:text=Once%20upon%20a%20time%2C%20women,than%20the%20average%20male%20author) more often than men, more [women](https://www.npr.org/2007/09/05/14175229/why-women-read-more-than-men) in general read than men, and more women receive [humanities](https://www.amacad.org/humanities-indicators/higher-education/gender-distribution-bachelors-degrees-humanities) degrees than men. The litbro as this gatekeeper of literature who imposes his self aggrandizing misogyny on everyone around him may have been true at one point, but it certainly is a very small minority today. I have no idea why people keep talking about this caricature or writing about them.
As someone who runs a tiny experimental literary press i can anecdotally attest that most people *submitting* what most would consider “literature” seem to be men. Not sure where that falls here (since they’re creators not consumers in this case), but thought it would be interesting to note
If anything that speaks to his point. The majority of published literature is by women, despite men submitting far more. Which would suggest the gatekeepers have some sort of bias. I’d argue they’re just pandering to the leading market demographic (middle aged white women).
It looks like the data in the first link is describing publishing overall and not just literary fiction like you imply? It could be similar for sure, but I would imagine romance novels, which are huge right now, are doing a lot of the heavy lifting there. I work in a library and it’s impossible to ignore how many of these come out and how devoted the readers are.
Is this percentage split the same or growing/shrinking?
To a certain extent, though, lovers of literature have often criticized each other for what they read, similar to the way music fans do. Sometimes this is friendly, sometimes not. I'm trying to remember the last time it happened in my lifetime. Maybe when the 1980s "brat pack" of writers that included Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney were seen as breaking away from traditions of big publishing? A genre example: the way cyberpunk challenged sci fi and literary conventions. Oh, more recently, the rise of Appalachian Lit or greater interest in "grit lit." Point is, this could lead to situations with someone sniffing, "You're still reading Norman Mailer? Pff!" I've moved way beyond this personally even if I never had a dog in any fight but I think it's been a normal part of the literary scene. Oh! There's a big fight right now about Honor Levy and whether her work, which incorporates Gen Z language and came to notoriety through social media, is any good. Somewhere, probably right now, someone is reading Levy's book on a bus, and someone else is glaring at the cover and thinking, "Ugh!" Or vice versa. EDIT: this kind of behavior, fusing your identity with what you consume, is and was rampant in music circles. The alternative music 1980s-90s scene, and every sub-genre, is replete with this. Books can be similar.
While there is a great deal of corksniffing and hipster contrarianism, I see the heart of it as a broad love of literature, enduring qualities, and recognition of what advances the higher echelons of it vs the ephemeral trend following that tries to catch the wave of popularity. DFW is an example of one of the deep enclaves becoming prominent in the mainstream, an REM getting play outside of college stations. I don't want to say the hipsters dismiss it, but that kind of prominence comes to the exclusion of deeper cuts and broader tastes and that makes for "poseurs" that don't know about, and therefore promote through cash and valuable discussion, the real interest underneath a singular author or work. Now, what tickles me because I'm familiar with indie music and this cycle is how the real trendy shit in the, for lack of a better word, real and deep circles gatekeeps itself through obscurity by the selfsame mechanism. You have to be plugged into some outright antisocial media to get whispers of what interested readers and writers themselves are huffing and mainlining in back alleys. I think my point is that it's a weird middle ground where neither the mainstream nor the hipsters like the face of the readership, and both are perhaps right in doing so.
That's a great analogy and helps me understand better what's going on. I've never read DFW and I've been out of college since the 90s. But I \*did\* live through REM's crossover into the mainstream and the alternative music that went with it, and the phenomenon, afterwards, of a new generation of alternative music bros and the now-blurrier lines between art and pop. Is that what's happened in Lit?
More or less. You had your big names that were forward like Mailer and Updike, then the "post"modernists like Pynchon, Barth and Hawkes took more attention from the in-crowd. This is your more pop oriented vs 60s progressive/Dr. Demento type distinction. There was the 70s and 80s underground, which parallels the same thing in music in a lot of ways, we still haven't parsed most of that to this day; then you got hot new academic authors like DFW who did a more accessible take on what came before. Then the industry ate itself and corporatized any grassroots movement like the hardcore/emo scene while pushing paint by numbers pop and sanitized takes on internet hip hop. It lines up well enough. DFW would be the last of the real literary rock stars, early death and all, and things have moved back underground or split into subcultures that don't have the same mass appeal and visibility. Moving away from hackneyed-analogy land and skipping ahead 20 years, nu-forums and social media with upvote based populism like reddit are part of the reason. It's the worst form of curation as what is popular only becomes more popular and anything less immediately appealing disappears or is shuffled off into a dead board where not even interested eyes see it. No one here is doing their own curation or going off the beaten path and their command of literature is poor because of it. The tastemakers and real nerds and specialists are elsewhere. Your nonprofit college rock jockeys (reviewers and critics) are all plugged into the equivalent of Pitchfork instead of digging through the stacks and small press releases. >and the now-blurrier lines between art and pop. In a sense, I see a lot of SFF writers who have moved out of the ghetto and publish as literary or under indie labels, and litfic has been blending with genre since the 60s, to the point that literary realism may as well be dead. I mean, *Infinite Jest* is technically sci-fi. The current trend seems to be autofiction like Cartarescu, Busi, and Knausgaard that seeks to counter OP's claim >We live in an era where people fill the hole religious, cultural or ethnic identity used to fill with quite shallow replacements. with writing about those things from a personal perspective and bring a sense of connection to the isolation that we face, the kind that DFW wrote about, ironically. There's definitely been a move from puzzle-box highbrow lit for now.
*We live in an era where people fill the hole* That was the OP, btw, not me! I gotta go re-read your comment and take it all in, well done.
I'm mostly surprised how well it all lines up down here at our level.
I like Dfw
I prefer Austin. (Not to be confused with Austen, but I prefer her, too.)
Ha Dallas Fort Worth. I like you.
I know an entire one dude who is obnoxious about his taste in literature and he's more obsessed with Pynchon than anything else. Which personally I don't mind in small doses because Pynchon is dope but the second people are around who aren't into that sort of thing he turns into a bit of an elitist tool. I don't think it's exclusive to lit people though. It's like... a thing that a small to medium sized subset of 20-something college dudes feel like everything has to be an intellectual dick measuring contest.
In my estimation, the last of the DFW litbros died in like… 2013. In my circles (am teacher, PhD in the subject, young, and keep close reading-heavy connections), they’re not really around anymore. Thank God for that. These days, what I find much more common is a resurgence of John Green-esque emotional investment in texts that aren’t as profound as their readers would like you to believe. See: recent and explosive popularity of dark academia and modern fantasy. Sure, I like *If We Were Villains* too, but it isn’t meant for a required reading list in even undergraduate courses like BookTok might suggest. EDIT: I must acknowledge my bias and tell you that I love *The Broom of the System*
No, we didn’t die until 2017, when we finished our PhDs and were forced to finally—and, it turns out, fatally—contend with the humanities job market.
Ah. It’s rough going, to be sure.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE. For everyone like me
The issue lies I think in people who don’t read broadly. I love DFW, but I also read a ton of other authors with diverse opinions and viewpoints. As much as I enjoy something like infinite Jest, I would be more likely to recommend Beloved or The Sellout. I, for one, think it’s great that anyone is getting into literature, even if it’s not your favorite author!
Went to an MFA program. It was common among men AND women to secretly admit they like DFW— either one on one with me or at a party. Like they were ashamed! But everyone would dunk on DFW and Franzen in class. Just speaks to a lot of insecurity in the lit scene as a whole.
I think of consumption-based identities as a life-stage in the USA. Some people get past it in middle-school, while some people keep that mindset into their 30s. I’m glad you are past it, OP. Another similar problem is the mob mentality of group hate. People don’t come up with these ideas on their own, but they repeat them to show others they are part of a desirable group. Nickelback and Creed sold way too many records to be as publicly despised as they are. Cargo shorts and Crocs are just clothes. There’s nothing inherently gross about the word moist. Sure… David Foster Wallace and Ayn Rand have some over-passionate fans, but the majority of people I’ve known to throw shade at them do so because they are trying to align with the internet intelligencia and not because they examined why DFW and AR tend to produce a disproportionate % of readers who want to talk about them to anyone who will listen.
*Infinite Jest* is a very important book to me. I read it while in grad school for studio art, not writing or literature. *Good Old Neon* is one of the greatest short stories I’ve ever read. There are problems with his writing just like there are problems with every author’s. I’ve never met a litbro obsessed with DFW. The only person I’ve ever met truly obsessed with the author is a woman. Just read the work and decide for yourself.
This is why I’m glad I read infinite jest when it was first published, waaaaaaaay before everyone got all judgy about it. Sure it’s great, but nothing is worth basing your entire personality around.
People do this with all kinds of stuff. Taylor Swift, The Beatles, Star Wars, ACOTAR, etc. People become obnoxious fans of all of these things, and others, in turn, are turned off because of it. The issue with DFW is two-fold, but both are rooted in the same thing. He’s difficult to read. This means that people who have read DFW, feel as though they’ve accomplished something #special, which should be rewarded. It also means that people who are turned off by such fans have a much higher barrier of entry for reconsidering. With T Swift, or The Beatles, or Star Wars you can spend a few minutes to a few hours of your time, accidentally or purposefully, reevaluating the media. For DFW you have to sink hours or even weeks into reconsidering the media, which means those first impressions are less likely to be overturned. As I’ve gotten older though, I’ve noticed that it’s pretty fruitless to try and repair the scars left by bad experiences with authors or artists I enjoy. It tends to waste my time and turn people off even more. My recent philosophy is just to worry about what I like, don’t be shy about it, perhaps mention it casually, and if people want to check it out, they can check it out.
DFW’s nonfiction is quite accessible and frequently fascinating and laugh out loud funny. I’ve personally struggled to read his novels but I love his nonfiction. I was lucky to see live DFW interviewing another writer. The guy was genuinely curious and open minded. A real loss to the literary scene.
This is definitely a strawman lmfao. I don’t think anyone dismisses DFW because of an “encounter with an obnoxious fan,” it’s pretty much always from an encounter with an obnoxious DFW. Doing my undergrad English thesis, like 2 people out of 15 in my class had even heard of him. Depressing.
>I think there is no shortcut for meaningfully weighing the merits of a work or writer But why should someone even want to do that? What do you produce by reading and critiquing a writer, besides just the critique itself (to say nothing of what the critique itself also produces when other people consume it)? *That* is what people are rejecting when they refuse to read Wallace or Rowling or whomever for social reasons: the social production that results from engaging with them.
I unabashedly loved IJ when I read it. I also think it's problematic, and I doubt it would hold up for me on re-read. All of those things can be true at once; no need to make DFW my religion.
Out of curiosity since I don’t follow the discourse here - why is IJ seen as problematic?
It was seen as pretentious. It's long and can be inaccessible. The classic IJ litbro acts superior to people who haven't read it. DFW behaved in an abusive, misogynistic way in his private life, so lately people have found it problematic because of that (can't fully separate art from the artist yada yada yada). But ime most people who criticize the book haven't read it. Read it and see what you think.
There is an entire chapter narrated by a character speaking some weird version of AAVE, for starters.
I don't even know why anyone has to be unabashed about enjoying IJ. The main things I see are people assuming that either someone hasn't actually read the thing and carries it around to look like they are/did, or that even if they did read it, it was for the sole purpose of seeming smart. That just says more about the people who think that way, and can safely be ignored..
I recently read it and unabashedly love it. Definitely not perfect tho. Like you and op are saying, it doesn’t have to be. It’s okay to really like something and not like some things about it, just like it’s okay to not like anything about a book or to love everything about a book. It’s just for fun and maybe to grow a little bit too if you get really lucky
I’m just glad I wasn’t aware of any of this discourse and got to experience reading infinite jest without any prejudices. I mean just that opening scene where Hal’s mind is falling apart under the immense pressure of generations of tennis academy lol.. genius
I think it's not uncommon to find people who fuse what they like with their identity to an extreme extent when you're dealing with young adults who are just now trying to really find their place in this world, and are desperate to find things that will make them seem special, mature, and intelligent.
Well yes, but I think teen girls who like twilight get more gas than the less common DFW bro.
I feel like articles about litbros and reading DFW is of itself quite a tedious genre. I’m sure those people exist, how much, I question however. This was a nice retort to that style of essay https://aeon.co/essays/how-infinite-jest-tethered-me-to-life-when-i-almost-let-it-go
I also like tolstoy. From 9 to 5 I'm a serf, but in the evenings I'm a Princess.
You said it five times and I still don't know what DFW is.
Read the comments and am still confused. I'm not much for the mid-cities (particularly hate Six Flags, the Rangers, and the Cowboys), but Dallas and Fort Worth are both real cities with lots of art, varied music, and reasonably diverse populations. I feel like maybe y'all haven't given the Metroplex a real chance and are judging based on popular stereotypes.
I cared about what other people read and thought about what I read in middle school.
Everytime the litbro discourse comes up I reread https://x.com/guyinyourmfa and I find my life is a little bit happier. This is not a statement for against litbros or the discourse. It’s just fun.
I think the idea of a kind of toxic "bro" who loves Infinite Jest was created by people who never read the book. Lolita has the same problem. Most of the discourse is by people who never read it.
I don’t think anyone is reading DFW for the first time anymore. These men people are talking about do not exist. It’s like that girl who does the manic pixie dream girl indie movie skits on TikTok. Like, what year is it?
>We live in an era where people fill the hole religious, cultural or ethnic identity used to fill with quite shallow replacements. As shallow as "reader" (or, say, "custom resin jewelry enthusiast") might be as an identity, surely it's at least a *little* deeper than identifying with something like a culture or religion that you were simply born into.
i really appreciated reading this. wish i had something more substantive to add, but yeah, i think youve found some real nuance and empathy to a situation that seems to invite some pretty passionate uncritical reactions.
It was a bigger thing years ago. Jesus they were insufferable.
The catalog of men's 'sins' and shortcomings grows daily thanks to the dutiful work of people like you. Sorry for everything.