There's a new piece by Jay Miller about David Foster Wallace over at Literatured.com, The Avant-Garde of The Pale King:
David Foster Wallace, whether unwittingly, uses realism in a new way, as a weapon against conceptualism. Conceptualism demands art as product of a concept, which results in reproducible paintings or sculptures (like readymades), and in prose, a plotted idea which is explained in prose produced via a schema. Because of conceptualism, one can divine “Soylent Green” to be about people being turned into food without ever having read the text of Harry Harrison; this is a problem which the anti-conceptualistic avant-garde tackles. In denying a plot, David Foster Wallace denies the reading community an easy way to discuss the book. By eliminating plot, he forces the description of the novel as “About the IRS”, and makes null conceptualism’s bane of letting a literary community discuss matters literary without reading the discussed works. Knowing this, he could comfortably let plot be forgotten, for he knew the plotless work must be discussed and therefore his need for conclusion on themes was unnecessary, as made clear by his minimalist’s schema titled “Embryonic outline” (available in the notes section at the end of the novel).
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I'm tired, and I've given up trying to parse it. What does it...mean?