Fantastic article over at <HTMLGIANT> - David Foster Wallace and Imagining Moral Fiction. HTMLGIANT have a history of excellent DFW post, this one is no exception:
I want to concentrate on Wallace’s understanding of the fictionist as, essentially and necessarily, an artist concerned with ethics, with how and why we do the things we do, with aesthetics as absolute freedom, with evil and with personal truth–truth concealed by a lie. And I want to ask why we are not more concerned with his vision. Why we do not, by and large, see aesthetics as ethics, as an ethical act, a metapolitics, for which we, as writers with the power and duty to transform, are deeply and inescapably responsible. And how we get from ethics to moral literature: literature with deep conviction and passion toward the event of truth.
(via Matt Bucher - Don't forget Matt is coordinating the second bolano-l group read of Bolano's 2666 starting today!)
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Comments
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In many ways it's hard to imagine that this writer is only 19 (?). In other ways, with no offense intended to him, his writing style in this essay (not his fiction) seems like it's written by an apprentice writer; no bad thing in itself, but his desire to come across as authoritative is obvious in his choice of phrases(e.g. "make bank"). But perhaps if I didn't know his age that wouldn't bug me at all. Intelligent, reflexive writer, though.