David Foster Wallace on Irony, Television, and Sincerity

In E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction, David Foster Wallace examines the strange relationship between television, irony, and contemporary American culture. Television, he argues, became extraordinarily good at absorbing the attitudes once used to criticize it: self-awareness, cynicism, parody, and knowing detachment. The result is a culture in which being sophisticated increasingly means anticipating every possible criticism of yourself before anyone else can make it. Irony gives us a way to avoid being naive, but it can also make sincerity, commitment, and genuine belief feel embarrassing. Wallace is ostensibly writing about television and fiction in the early 1990s, but the essay reads remarkably well as an account of the culture that followed: advertising that mocks advertising, brands that joke about being brands, and online personalities who seem permanently aware of how they are being perceived. We’ll use the essay to ask what happens when criticism itself becomes part of the system it is meant to criticize. Can irony still function as a form of resistance once everyone speaks its language? And if detachment has become the default posture of modern culture, what would it mean to communicate sincerely without simply becoming naive? the reading can be found here