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“You (Plural): The Relationship between Popular Media

Formats and Conceptions of Self in David Foster Wallace and

Jennifer Egan”

Adam Kelly lists the ‘now-canonical formulations’ of postmodern criticism

presented in Jameson’s landmark ‘Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late

Capitalism’1 as ‘the death of affect, the loss of history, the fragmentation of the

subject, [and] the subsumption of the natural into the cultural.’2 Although this list

is not exhaustive, it does bring together some of the central concerns of

postmodernism, as well as providing a precedent for the focus of this work –

namely, the influence of media formats such as television and social media upon

the ‘death of affect’ and the ‘fragmentation of the subject,’ explored through the

works of David Foster Wallace and Jennifer Egan, an author who has received

undeservedly little critical attention. Although television was not a new

phenomenon for post-seventies America, the unprecedented variety and

accessibility of cable television revolutionised home entertainment, providing an

affordable and easy leisure activity to almost all U.S homes. This, of course, bore

its mark upon the population; As Wallace notes in ‘E Unibus Pluram’, ‘It's not

paranoid or hysterical to acknowledge that television in large doses affects

people's values and self-esteem in deep ways. That televisual conditioning

influences the whole psychology of one's relation to himself, his mirror, his loved

1 Jameson, Fredric, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, CA: Duke University Press, 1991)2 Kelly, Adam, ‘Beginning with Postmodernism’, Twentieth-Century Literature 57.3 & 57.4 (2011) 391-422 (398)

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ones, and a world of real people and real gazes’3; The same sentiment may be

readily applied to social media formats such as Facebook. In this essay I will

argue that these media formats vastly alter self-perception and self-

configuration, exploring how these alterations are represented in recent U.S

fiction. I will first focus on television, arguing that it engenders a spectatorial

approach to one’s own life and exploring presentations of this in Wallace’s work.

I will then look at the reflective nature of television in terms of character or

occupational roles, specifically the way in which it both receives and then

governs notions of how a particular figure such as a policeman should be.

Following this, I will explore the formulation of cliché in television and what

implications this has for fiction, looking at how a writer can overcome this

devaluation of dramatic experience. I will then briefly explore how music is

employed as metaphor in Egan’s Visit From the Goon Squad, before focusing on

social media and its effects on self-perception/construction, identity

dissociation, communication and the creation of an atomized, posthuman society.

“Black Mirrors”

The act of watching television encourages a fragmentation of subjectivity

resulting in a spectatorial perception of life. This is a notion that Wallace

supports, in arguing that ‘the practice of “watching” is expansive. Exponential.

We spend enough time watching, pretty soon we start watching ourselves

watching.’4 This concept is dramatised in ‘Good Old Neon’: As the narrator

explains, the root of his self-perceived fraudulence is that ‘at an early age I’d

3 Wallace, David Foster, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (London: Abacus, 1998) p534 Ibid, p34

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somehow chosen to cast my lot with my life’s drama’s supposed audience instead

of with the drama itself’5, resulting in an inescapable narcissism and the

devaluation of personal experience to mere opportunities in which to validate

his image of himself. This spectatorial perspective is also apparent in Egan’s ‘A

Visit From the Goon Squad’: In the chapter entitled ‘Out of Body’, written entirely

in second-person, the narrator asks ‘which one is really ‘you’, the one saying and

doing whatever it is, or the one watching?’6 The inverted commas surrounding

‘you’ imply the fictitious or hollow nature of ‘authentic selfhood’ in a postmodern

culture. This perspective also contributes to an acute self-consciousness, which

seems a logical result of televisual media: By allowing a kind of voyeurism from

any number of angles –many of which are impossible or awkward for the human

eye to replicate, for example aerial shots, close-ups, or from the perspective of

inanimate objects - it follows that people will begin to visualise themselves in

public from the same infinity of angles employed in film and television,7

contributing to an inescapable sense of being under constant scrutiny.

In ‘Good Old Neon’, however, television is not only employed as a means for

metaphor but is also used to drive the plot; Neal’s suicide is, ostensibly, a result

of seeing a sit-com in which his own complex is mocked, a joke that ‘got a huge

laugh from the show’s studio audience, which indicated that they – and so by

demographic extension the whole national audience at home as well –

recognized what a cliché and melodramatic type of complaint the inability-to-

5 Wallace, David Foster, Oblivion: Stories (London: Abacus, 2005) p1766 Egan, Jennifer, A Visit From the Goon Squad (London: Corsair, 2010) p1977 For an analysis of how various camera angles can be employed in film and television to create feelings of anxiety, see Slavoj Žižek’s discussion of Hitchcock’s Psycho: Žižek, Slavoj, ‘The Undergrowth of Enjoyment: How Popular Culture can Serve as an Introduction to Lacan’, The Žižek Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999) p53

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love concept was’. 8 What Neal fails to recognise, of course, is that the laughter is

inauthentic. Sit-com, after all, has the ability to stage its own reception as the

performance occurs, resulting in a debilitation of individual interpretation; the

watcher is either ‘in on the joke’ or left out, marginalised. Neal’s dilemma is not

so much that he has cast his lot with his ‘supposed audience’ but that he fails to

recognise not only the fictitiousness of the studio audience but also his own.

Living a spectatorial life also inevitably leads to self-consciousness or, at its

extreme, hyper-self-consciousness. This paranoia is confronted throughout Brief

Interviews with Hideous Men, (hereafter referred to as ‘Brief Interviews’) most

compactly in ‘A Radically Condensed History of Postindustrial Life’ in which

every social act carried out is a disingenuous performance born out the anxiety

of ‘hoping to be liked.’9 Wallace, however, provides another approach to it in an

earlier work, ‘My Appearance’. This story focuses not on the audience of

television but on the actors, who understandably have more of a right to fear

spectatorship than most. The effect of this is shown through the blurring and

inversion of public and private identities, evident in the following passage:

I am a woman who dislikes being confused; it upsets me. I wanted, after

all, to be both sharp and relaxed.

“Appear,” my husband corrected, “both sharp and relaxed”10

Unsettlingly, what appears to be an interior monologue turns out to be spoken

out loud, giving the impression that she has no private space of her own. This

8 Wallace, Oblivion: Stories, p1689 Wallace, David Foster, Brief Interviews With Hideous Men (London: Abacus, 2001) p010 Wallace, David Foster, Girl with Curious Hair (London: Abacus, 1997) p181

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blurring of textual boundaries also appears in Egan’s ‘Look at Me’, in a slightly

different form: Charlotte’s stream-of-consciousness rendition of her encounter

with Halliday flips between narratorial rendition and narratorial dramatisation,

distinguished by two different fonts which often run into each other.11 This, Kelly

notes, is exemplary of the ‘postmodern consciousness,’ characterised by a

‘detached awareness, even in the moment of action, of being the subject of future

narration and/or technologized representation’.12 This is a useful working

definition, one that can also be mapped on to ‘Good Old Neon’, particularly in

Neal’s self-congratulatory attitude to his ‘fine and genuine-seeming performance’

in his pre-suicide measures.13

In ‘My appearance’, the public/private boundary is again inverted when she

appears on the Letterman show, subject to the ‘Megagaze.’14 Here, she maintains

that she “wasn’t acting, with David Letterman.”15 It would appear at first that she

has finally found an authentic ‘self’ she feels comfortable with, yet, like almost

everything in Wallace’s fiction, this is a double bind: If she only feels herself

when subject to the gaze of millions of viewers, then it follows that what she

conceives of as an authentic self is yet another performance dependent on an

audience. The closest she gets to confronting her self is through her husband’s

advised self-deprecation on-air:16 Although on the one hand this process forms a

kind of critical self-confrontation, on the other it is yet another self-defence

mechanism, a shying away from earnestness to guard against allegations of

11 Egan, Jennifer, Look At Me, (London: Corsair, 2011) p32912 Kelly, (403)13 Wallace, Oblivion: Stories, p17614 Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, p5315 Wallace, Girl with Curious Hair, p19816 Ibid, p182

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sincerity and consequent ridicule. As the title makes clear, her ‘appearance’

forms a stand-in for an authentic selfhood, a position that Wallace presents as a

consequence of living a performative life.

Another take on this is found within the same collection, in ‘Little Expressionless

Animals’. Julie’s identity becomes absorbed into her role to the extent that she is

described as ‘the game show incarnate.’17 This comes at the expense of her public

life and identity: she is forced to wear a male disguise to avoid recognition.18 This

symbolises the obscuration of her ‘true’ self, a recurrent theme throughout the

story – Julie and Faye’s interchange of fictitious scenarios that led to their

sexuality is another example of this. Faye’s self-defensive, apologetic approach

towards her lesbianism is characteristic of the postmodern eschewing of

earnestness: It is a familiar binary in Wallace’s work, the binary ‘between the

construction of defenses, and the attempt to break down those defenses in the

name of love.’19 This story also contains many instances of glass or screen

imagery, from the ‘walls of glass’ of Faye’s apartment20 to the imaginary ex-

boyfriend who observes Faye ‘through the window.’21 In the former, both Julie

and Faye are contained within the glass, suggesting that their interchange is a

kind of television-romance. Sure enough, their exchange has all the clichés of the

genre: ‘They compliment each other’s bodies. They complain against the brevity

of the night.’22 In the latter, however, Faye is imaginarily watched ‘through the

17 Ibid, p2518 Ibid, p3219 Boddy, Kasia, ‘A Fiction of Response’, A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies, Ed. Marshall Boswell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) p2920 Wallace, Girl With Curious Hair, p421 Ibid, p3522 Ibid, p4

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window’ by her ex-boyfriend and his friends, turned into an object of voyeurism

on the other side of the screen, contributing to her feeling of ‘incompleteness’.23

The reconfiguration of self according to one’s occupational role as a result of

‘literary and cinematic genres’24 is a theme also explored in Egan’s ‘Look at Me’.

As Irene posits, police “watch cop shows, too. And how does their experience of

those shows affect their experience as cops?”25 Although this phenomenon exists

in literature that precedes television (a good example is detective fiction),

television has the advantage of being multi-sensory, demonstrating visually and

audibly how a role ‘should’ be fulfilled. Here, Egan highlights the two-way nature

of ‘stock’ characterisation: A pre-conceived notion of how something or someone

should be represented is broadcasted and then absorbed back into the real

world; the representation is then re-enacted and the cycle perpetuates itself.

Wallace also supports this idea: as he claims in ‘E Unibus Pluram’, ‘The real

authority on a world we now view as constructed and not depicted becomes the

medium that constructs our world-view.’26, 27 This process has vast implications

for fiction writers: it prefigures characterisation and at the same time renders

the use of the characterisation a cliché.

23 Ibid, 34-524 Egan, Look At Me, p27925 Ibid, p27926 Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, p6227 In light of this statement, consider the use of cliché in ‘Brief Interview #11 06-96’, in which the ‘hideous man’ in question tries to pacify the woman he is leaving by using a string of Hollywood phrases such as ‘I’d give anything in the world not to hurt you. I love you. I Always will love you.’ (p61) These hollow statements are a kind of emotional autopilot, serving as a means to pacify his own conscience rather than the woman’s distress: His emotional honesty is merely another ploy – the irony lies in the fact that it only works on himself.

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The same process can also be applied to emotionally potent situations such as

break-ups or suicides. The endless recycling of these narratives in film, sit-com

and soap opera strips them of their affect: This is confronted in ‘Good old Neon’,

in which Neal worries that his suicide will be perceived as ‘stale and

manipulative’ due to the worn-out nature of the narrative, whilst also realising

that ‘the reason we’ve seen so many of them in dramas is that the scenes really

are dramatic and compelling and let people communicate very deep, complicated

emotional realities that are almost impossible to articulate in any other way.’28

Yet not only is the situation depicted presented as trite but also the metafictional

style in which it is written. Although Wallace took a lot from Barth and other

pioneers of metafiction, he was very critical of its effectiveness in his time. In

‘Octet’ he describes ‘metafictional self-reference’ as ‘lame and tired and facile.’29

He also refers to it comically as ‘postclever metaformal hooey,’30 or, in ‘Westward

the Course of Empire Takes its Way’, ‘meatfiction’31, implying that it had become

‘easily digestible and unnutritious’.32 His use of ‘inbent’33 in ‘Octet’ and ‘inbent

spiral’34 in ‘Good Old Neon’ recall the funhouse corridor ‘that winds around on

itself like a whelk shell’ in which Ambrose gets lost in Barth’s ‘Lost in the

Funhouse’.35 Wallace reappropriates Barth’s classic metaphor to represent both

the solipsism of Neal and the encaged, exhaustive nature of metafiction. As

Timmer notes, ‘the subjects of his stories are locked in this empty position

28 Wallace, Oblivion: Stories, p17629 Wallace, ‘Brief Interviews’, p12430 Ibid, p12831 Wallace, Girl With Curious Hair, p31032 Boddy, p2833 Wallace, Brief Interviews, p13534 Wallace, Oblivion: Stories, p18135 Barth, John, Lost in the Funhouse: Fiction for Print, Tape, Live voice (New York: Bantam Books, 1980) p80

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(encaged, entrapped), like the narrator [of ‘Good Old Neon’] seems to be locked

in a metafictional, postmodern narrative practice. This narrative practice, and

the conception of self are very much related; the result is ‘solipsistic solipsism’.36

Her equating of the style with the subject’s solipsism is a valid claim;

metafiction’s self-absorbed nature has long been observed, notably in

Hutcheon’s Narcissistic Narrative, in which she writes ‘the novel from its very

beginnings has always nurtured a self-love, a tendency towards self-obsession.

Unlike its oral forbears, it is both the storytelling and the story told’37 -

metafiction, however, focuses on the former, on the ‘imaginative process (of

storytelling), instead on that of the product (the story told)’38, further increasing

the tendency to self-absorption. Timmer’s concept of ‘solipsistic solipsism’ is,

however, ambiguous and not very useful, as is her use of ‘post-postmodernism’

throughout her work: This term negates Wallace’s attempts to move literature

onwards from an increasingly worn-out postmodernism, implying instead that

his work is merely a newer reapplication of the same tradition.

But how is this cycle of stale cliché and literary style overcome? How can

‘authentic selfhood’ (or even ‘authenticity’, for that matter) be located, if it exists

at all, in a culture characterised by inauthenticity, self-defense mechanisms and a

fear of earnestness? As Timmer observes, within the self-perceived hollowness

of many of Wallace’s characters ‘there is always a certain something, a feeling,

that is still there; which cannot be clearly spoken of from this empty subject-

36 Timmer, Nicole, Do You Feel It Too? The Post-postmodern Syndrome in American Fiction at the Turn of the Millenium (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010) pp115-637 Hutcheon, Linda, Narcissistic Narrative (Waterloo: WIlfrid Laurier University Press, 1980) p1038 Ibid, p3

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position, which can only, it seems, be empathized with.’39 Although the language

she uses is vague, she does raise the important issue of empathy: In ‘Good Old

Neon’, Neal’s ‘empty subject-position’ is overcome by the revelation that Neal is

in fact a stand-in for ‘David Wallace’: Neal’s ‘hollowness’ is replaced by ‘David

Wallace’s ‘outline or ghost of a person.’40 But this stretch of empathy from ‘David

Wallace’ provides the impetus for the reader to make the same empathetic leap

to ‘David Wallace’/the narrator, thereby bringing an unprecedented emotional

sincerity to a genre characterised by a distancing of oneself from sentimental

earnestness, as well as rejuvenating a narrative worn smooth from overuse.

“Music As Metaphor”

This section will briefly discuss how music is employed symbolically in Egan’s ‘A

Visit From the Goon Squad’. Although there is not enough space here to discuss

the full scope of how music functions within the novel, there are a number of

instances in which music is used as a means of commentary upon the

increasingly artificial and technologically-absorbed culture.

As Bennie claims about the contemporary state of music, ‘the problem was

precision, perfection; the problem was digitization, which sucked the life out of

everything.’41 This refers to the transition from analogue to digital signal in the

music industry, from an infinitely variable analogue signal to a binary black-and-

white digital one (See Fig. 1)

39 Timmer, p11440 Wallace, Oblivion, p18141 Egan, A Visit From the Goon Squad, p24

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Figure One

Visualisation of an Analogue Signal

Visualisation of a Digital Signal

As the above illustration shows, a digital signal is quantified: a series of one’s and

zero’s. This is symbolic of the ‘rationalisation of human beings’42 central to Egan’s

fiction. Bennie’s complaint about the ‘bloodless constructions’43 born out of

binary coding is reflected in Scotty’s approach to experience: “It’s all just X’s and

O’s,” he claims, “and you can come by those a million different ways.”44 His

argument is that ‘if we human beings are information processing machines,

42 Egan, Look At Me, p22843 Ibid, p2444 Ibid, p108

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reading X’s and O’s and translating that information into what people oh so

breathlessly call ‘experience’, and if I had access to all that same information via

cable TV... If I had not only the information but the artistry to shape that

information using the computer inside my brain… then, technically speaking, was

I not having all the same experiences those other people were having?’45 On the

one hand, Scotty’s approach to experience is Blakean, mystical even: this reading

of Scotty is supported by his fishing, connoting religion (it is appropriate due to

his role as a musical ‘hero’ that the fish he brings Bennie is a ‘striped bass’)46 and

his reappearance in the last chapter as a kind of saviour, an answer to the

‘craving [for] the embodiment of their own unease.’47 In this reading, the mere

‘X’s and O’s’ are extrapolated and, through the prism of the imagination in a

Romantic sense, serve as just as valid an experience – if not more so. On the

other hand, Scotty’s reductionist approach to experience – viewing it as nothing

more than binary code – is symptomatic of his withdrawal from the public, the

‘real world’. Here, Egan connects the technology used to encode information with

conceptions of self and experience. In this understanding, Scotty is a victim of the

information age; someone for whom experience has been devalued to mere

‘information’.

“The Anti-Social Network”

Social media formats such as Facebook or dating sites allow for an

unprecedented (and often irresistible) level of control over self-representation –

a euphemism, perhaps, for self-construction or self-fictionalisation. These

45 Ibid, p101-246 Ibid, p10547 Ibid, p344

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concerns about misrepresentation appear from the very start of ‘A Visit From the

Goon Squad,’ with the telling description of Sasha in which, despite being thirty-

five, ‘her online profiles all listed her as twenty-eight.’48 The relationship

between self-perception and these forums is central to Egan’s novel: they are a

vital constituent in her ‘vision of the impersonal tyranny of a mass, technicised

society.’49 This final section will explore the effect of social media upon the

individual/collective mentality and what implications it has for communication.

‘A Visit From the Goon Squad’ ends with a bleak dystopian New York City whose

inhabitants have become inseparable from their devices: A ‘totally administered

and technophilic postmodern society’50 pushed to breaking point. Lulu is

perfectly at home in this environment, ‘a living embodiment of the new ‘handset

employee.’’51 She feels far more comfortable communicating by text than

speech,52 showing her total absorption into social media and digital over physical

or verbal communication: She regards the stripped-down nature of ‘T’ing’ as

‘pure – no philosophy, no metaphors, no judgements’.53 The interconnected

simultaneous social landscape of the Internet results in her use of the collective

pronoun ‘we’ more often than ‘I’, indicative of a conception of a collective self

rather than an individual one. As Kelly notes, Egan’s fiction confronts how a

‘variety of technologies… combine to create a posthuman landscape and a

divided sense of identity,’54 using Hayles’s conjecture that ‘each person who

48 Ibid, p649 Mishra, Pankaj. ‘Modernity’s Undoing’, London Review of Books 33.7 (2011): 27-30. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n07/pankaj-mishra/modernitys-undoing [Accessed 28th April 2014]50 Kelly, (394)51 Egan, A Visit From the Goon Squad, p32552 Ibid, p32853 p32954 Kelly, (406)

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thinks this way begins to envision herself or himself as a posthuman collectivity,

an “I” transformed into a “we” of autonomous agents operating together to make

a self.’55 Although Kelly applies Hayles’s text to ‘Look at Me’, it seems better

represented in ‘A Visit From the Goon Squad.’ Lulu’s collective conception of self

is preceded by Alison’s pictorial representation of ‘us,’56 in which each

individual’s personal ‘circle’ lies mostly outside of the larger collective circle,

with some overlap; Lulu’s conception of self, on the other hand, might be

visualised as one large circle containing each individual circle, or a vast network

of closely overlapping circles with little personal ‘room’. The social landscape of

the culture presented, engendered by social media, is simultaneously atomized

and conflated: there is little sense of urban community, yet at the same time very

little sense of individualism.

In a similar way to Scotty’s understanding of experience as binary X’s and O’s,

Alex begins to inadvertently think and conceive in the forms of digital

communication, showing the permeation of the technology throughout his self-

understanding. At first he begins forming utterances in his head in the form of a

‘T’: he ‘found himself mentally composing the message: Nu job in th wrks. big $

pos. pls kEp opn mind.’57 Later, however, the technology becomes even more

pervasive; he starts inadvertently forming thoughts in the same style. He

comforts himself with a ‘self-administered poultice that arrived in the form of a

brain-T: no 1 nOs abt me. Im invysbl.’58 This mode of ‘crawl space’59 thinking

55 Hayles, N. Katherine, How we Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999) p656 Egan, A Visit From the Goon Squad, p24457 Ibid, p33358 Ibid, p33859 Ibid, p335

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shows the integration of communications media into his self-configuration. The

vicious economy of ‘T’ language resembles Orwell’s ‘Newspeak’, a nod, perhaps,

to a champion of the dystopian genre. Egan presents online social media as a

catalyst in stripping language of meaning: This is made explicit in Rebecca’s

study of ‘word casings… words that no longer had meanings outside quotation

marks.’60 Tellingly, these words include ‘identity’ and ‘friend’, words that have

been reduced to ‘husks… drained of life by their Web usage.’61 The inclusion of

‘identity’ indicates Egan’s belief that the self-representative facilities of the

Internet lead to an insidious self-abstraction and identity dissociation, or, at its

extreme, identity dissolution. This bleak vision negates Wallace’s ‘late-

Wittgensteinian faith in language as a public phenomenon; “the single most

beautiful argument against solipsism.”’62, 63 When language loses its meaning and

begins to fail, the argument crumbles alongside it. Yet there is some hope amidst

the barrenness of the social landscape, found in the temporary communal act of

watching the sunset, suggesting a lingering presence of the primeval amidst the

postmodern-saturated culture.

* * *

As I have shown, the effect of new media formats has vast implications for self-

conception. Contemporary fiction, if it is to have any wider social purpose,

cannot afford to ignore these shifting dynamics of self. Television, via its

spectatorial perspective and extremely effective (albeit skewed) representations

60 Ibid, p33161 Ibid, pp331-262 Boddy, p3763 Burn, Stephen, Conversations with David Foster Wallace (Oxford: University of Mississippi Press, 2012) p44

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of experience, has enormous influence upon how watchers view themselves. This

is a central concern in Wallace’s fiction, and the attempt to reclaim narratives

worn smooth from overuse and confront the hyper-self-consciousness it often

engenders forms the impetus of much of his work. Whereas television

encourages its audience to be consumers of its programmes and products, social

media turns the consumer into the product, causing widespread self-abstraction

and identity dissolution, a notion central to Egan’s fiction. How to reclaim

individual selfhood in an increasingly artificial culture forms the backdrop of the

work of each writer, despite the fact that both often seem critical of the idea of

‘authentic selfhood’. Ultimately, it seems that Egan would agree with Wallace’s

declaration of the role of fiction: to express ‘what it means to be a fucking Human

Being’64 in an increasingly dehumanised world.

Works Cited

Barth, John, Lost in the Funhouse: Fiction for Print, Tape, Live voice (New York:

Bantam Books, 1980)

64 Wallace, David Foster, ‘An Interview with David Foster Wallace’, Interview by Larry Mcaffery, Review Of Contemporary Fiction, 13.2 (Summer 1993), 127-50 (131)

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A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies, Ed. Marshall Boswell (Basingstoke:

Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)

Burn, Stephen, Conversations with David Foster Wallace (Oxford: University of

Mississippi Press, 2012)

Egan, Jennifer, Look At Me, (London: Corsair, 2011)

------------------ A Visit From the Goon Squad (London: Corsair, 2010)

Hayles, N. Katherine, How we Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics,

Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999)

Hutcheon, Linda, Narcissistic Narrative (Waterloo: WIlfrid Laurier University

Press, 1980)

Jameson, Fredric, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

(Durham, CA: Duke University Press, 1991)

Kelly, Adam, ‘Beginning with Postmodernism’, Twentieth-Century Literature 57.3

& 57.4 (2011) 391-422

Mishra, Pankaj. ‘Modernity’s Undoing’, London Review of Books 33.7 (2011): 27-

30. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n07/pankaj-mishra/modernitys-undoing

Orwell, George, Nineteen-Eighty-Four (London: Penguin, 2013)

Timmer, Nicole, Do You Feel It Too? The Post-postmodern Syndrome in American

Fiction at the Turn of the Millenium (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010)

Wallace, David Foster, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (London:

Abacus, 1998)

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----------------------------Brief Interviews With Hideous Men (London: Abacus, 2001)

----------------------------Girl with Curious Hair (London: Abacus, 1997)

----------------------------‘An Interview with David Foster Wallace’, Interview by

Larry Mcaffery, Review Of Contemporary Fiction, 13.2 (Summer 1993), 127-50

----------------------------Oblivion: Stories (London: Abacus, 2005)

Žižek, Slavoj, The Žižek Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999)

18