He was right about everything

hipsters are sad people

that seems to be something that he tried to answer all his life

that's not irony.

The alternative to what?

don't do it OP, people love you

Twenty years ago, Wallace wrote about the impact of television on U.S. fiction. He focused on the effects of irony as it transferred from one medium to the other. In the 1960s, writers like Thomas Pynchon had successfully used irony and pop reference to reveal the dark side of war and American culture. Irony laid waste to corruption and hypocrisy. In the aftermath of the ’60s, as Wallace saw it, television adopted a self-deprecating, ironic attitude to make viewers feel smarter than the naïve public, and to flatter them into continued watching. Fiction responded by simply absorbing pop culture to “help create a mood of irony and irreverence, to make us uneasy and so ‘comment’ on the vapidity of U.S. culture, and most important, these days, to be just plain realistic.” But what if irony leads to a sinkhole of relativism and disavowal? For Wallace, regurgitating ironic pop culture is a dead end:

'Anyone with the heretical gall to ask an ironist what he actually stands for ends up looking like an hysteric or a prig. And herein lies the oppressiveness of institutionalized irony, the too-successful rebel: the ability to interdict the question without attending to its subject is, when exercised, tyranny. It [uses] the very tool that exposed its enemy to insulate itself.'

So where have we gone from irony? Irony is now fashionable and a widely embraced default setting for social interaction, writing and the visual arts. Irony fosters an affected nihilistic attitude that is no more edgy than a syndicated episode of “Seinfeld.” Today, pop characters directly address the television-watching audience with a wink and nudge. (Shows like “30 Rock” deliver a kind of meta-television-irony irony; the protagonist is a writer for a show that satirizes television, and the character is played by a woman who actually used to write for a show that satirizes television. Each scene comes with an all-inclusive tongue-in-cheek.) And, of course, reality television as a concept is irony incarnate.

damn

Well, the alternative is being honest, saying something you mean and bearing the possible smirk and derision, giving a fuck. It's harder than it sounds.

irony in this case being irreverence borne of ignorance and ethical destitution.

it is grating sometimes. when you strip away the layers what are you left with exactly? all appearences, no lasting substantiality

"Eye-roh-knee is thuh sahng of the bird who has come to luhve its cehge"

This

there's probably a difference between irony and being unaware.

This is ironic because absolutely no one takes DFWs ideas seriously and only uses them to meme around, IRL and on Veeky Forums.

No it doesn't, sticks and stones nigga, what are you a pussy?

more like tragic

You'll have to be a little more clear, at least to me.
I don't have to "respect" a flower. For one, I don't have to anything and secondly I don't really know what this would mean. I can spend me time enjoying the flower beauty, but why is this related to obligations?

I bet Veeky Forums drove him to suicide.

That was actually very informative, thank you

Thank for for this well written post.
I have been baffled for the longest time about how /lit tends to idolize dfw yet seems to go against everything he tried to say. It is such a massive contradiction that I find it hard to reconcile the two. How can a place be filled with irony, sarcasm, memeing and still at the same time revere dfw?

By DFW being the label for a particular meme,
not the person DWF and his ideas

I think the correct words to describe it are "sad" and "banal".

Veeky Forums most often memes DFW for being sweating or committing suicide or otherwise being an awkward dweeb and bad writer.

...

evidently it is killing yourself

Do you think DFW hated cups with witticisms printed on them?

He would probably hate them, but then he'd feel insecure about that hatred, like maybe it's too insincere to hate these cups? so his recommended reading list for his students at university would consist of about 100 witty cups. There would be a test.

People here are "cucks", the want to be honest but don't have the balls to.

just took at a fat ass shit, my ass is all stretched and relaxed and empty, i got like buddha ass or sth

What he meant was he wanted people to be less cynical [i.e. unmoved by and critical/sceptical of him] and accept the Hallmarky schmaltz that was natural to his method of emotional expression as a socially clumsy asperger. At the same time he knew in his heart he was a brutal, ill-tempered child who could not help but lash out when he did not get his way - be it by rubbing his sister's face in dog shit, or trying to kill his the person he perceived to be his rival in winning the affections of another.

"If the woman I stalked would just stop putting up a cold "ironic" front to my increasingly bizarre advances and look into my heart and see the real me she would know how gentle and truthful I am trying to be with my actions."

He basically took this reoccurring theme in his life, combined it with his latent tendency towards violence, and projected it outward onto any available target as a need for them to be less critical [of him] and cold hearted [like him]. Whether it was B.E.E who was part of the intergenerational irony cabal and a threat to him personally for his dealings with the subject of repressed violent tendencies, or the cold monstrous world he always felt to be sending him disingenuous signals because he could not process meaning and intent as an abstraction separated from identity on many levels, it was always his own personal flaws and hangups he was projecting onto others, never any real observation about the state of people/things.

Hating on dfw is the real meme here, it's empty emotional reflex that rarely goes substantiated. When he's praised there's usually some specific discussion going along with it, I've never seen on here someone praise dfw with the same kind of fervor that he gets derided with