/lit/ - Literature

Was he the most truthbombed author of the 21st century?

Also, fav DFW book/piece? I loved Oblivion and most of Consider The Lobster

>Going on a date
>Topic changes to depression because we're both privileged gen Z upper middle class college students
>"My favorite author talks about this sorta stuff a lot"
>"Oh yeah, who?"
>"David Foster Wallace"
>"You're the 3rd guy I've dated that's mentioned him. You all even look the same."
>Try and backpeddle and talk about how I know that only douchebag men like DFW and but of course I like him and I'm just as bad as them
>End up deep dicking her anyway
Has this happened to anyone else? Is DFW back in vogue?

>>9596040
; _ ;

I hope this piece of wisdom makes you realise.

>>7354039

>>7196949
They do it for the shekels tbh.

How do I become the voice of a generation?
Pic unrelated.

Hi /lit/, i really need your advice. I am almost graduating as an electrical engineering, and although i like the field i always had an urge to make art. My personality is a lot more creative, i am a very sensitive person and eventhough i can work with logic my motivations are pure idealistic. I value novelty, creativity, beauty and imagination the most. I went into engineering because i found it aesthetically pleasing, but the real world doesn't allow people to be that idealistic without suffering a little, so i had to endure a lot of hard work to get some pleasure out of it.
What i want to do now is to write a novel. I really want to express myself in some way and i have a strong intuition that i can make something good. The problem is that when i was researching authors that i considered great, and trying to find how they learned their craft, i found that almost all of them went to college to study english, philosophy or something related. I never found an author who was similar to me and i am really starting to think writing isnt just something that i can do artistically without proper training in a renowned college. Does /lit/ have any opinion on this? Can you help me in some way? Maybe telling me how to start, or sharing your opinion on how education is needed/valuable to be a writer? Thanks /lit/.

>>7057937
>How is it not scifi?
Well you can classify it as sci fi if you're really hellbent on doing so but there's really no point. It doesn't have the classic sci fi elements like space exploration, alien races, time travel, there's not a lot of science fiction (in the sense of concrete scientific speculation about the future) involved etc. It's just literary fiction with some minor sci fi elements. I'm not looking down on genre fiction, but this book just doesn't fit the genre and if you're a sci fi fan you might be disappointed.

>And is it still worth a read?
Personally I enjoyed the book but I think it has its flaws. Basically to me DFW is a writer with fantastic observational skills, he's good at describing scenery and extrapolating on certain quirks of individual characters, putting you in their shoes, making you feel the situation and describing things with nuance and great detail without getting boring. He's very po-mo in every regard. He has a firm grasp of what he thinks is wrong with todays world. That's his weakness as well, because it seems for all his critical thinking he couldn't make the jump and gather the confidence to really, firmly take a certain stance on things, he's always deconstructing something, sometimes brilliantly illuminating, sometimes just navel gazing, leading nowhere. You can feel crippling depression in every paragraph, sometimes close up and paralysing, sometimes just lurking in the distance, mental fog on the horizon of the scene. Even if he didnt want to be that person, he's very much a woe is me type guy and he sometimes fails to really keep his own thoughts and worldview seperate from that of his characters to a degree that it taints his works. Doesn't matter who he's describing there's always a hint of bandana and tennis shorts. He was a little too self-observant yet not quite self-aware enough, if that makes any sense.

That's how I perceive it anyways.

Anyways if you want to get into DFW i suggest you read some of his shorts, or maybe his essays, which some argue are the best part of his work.

>The projection in this quote

Who the hell is he to define what is "really human"?