david foster wallace - is he a cunt?

.. what?

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/affective-exchange-amy-hungerfords-making-literature-now

Hungerford, however, does not see the gain of “love” in the work of another contemporarily canonical icon, David Foster Wallace — she sees the cost of hatred. On the basis of preliminary evidence of Wallace’s “misogyny” found in selections of his short stories and in D. T. Max’s biography of Wallace (Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, 2012), Hungerford declares that she will “not read any further in Wallace’s work” and proposes: “If there was something rotten in Wallace’s relationships with women [ … ] might there be something rotten in the writer-reader relationship, too?” She suggests that if Foer’s writer-reader ethos is “lovemaking,” then Wallace’s is “fucking.” Thus she posits — as “heretical” as it may seem — that every act of reading can be an “act of choosing.” In the case of herself and Wallace, she “refuse[ s ]” her consent.

In September 2016, Hungerford published a version of her Wallace chapter as an article, “On Refusing to Read,” in The Chronicle of Higher Education, which sparked competing cries of support and dissent. As Tom LeClair notes in his Full Stop review of her book, Hungerford’s Chronicle article has a different argumentative thrust: she refuses Wallace in order to resist the “market imperatives” which led his publishers to “dare” reviewers to read the tome-like Infinite Jest and then led those reviewers to assign it critical value as recompense for their cognitive and temporal losses. While this argument is also in Making Literature Now, it takes a backseat to Hungerford’s misogyny claim which, in turn, is absent from the article. LeClair reads this omission as a ploy on Hungerford’s part, a “defanged” teaser to her book’s melodramatic “two takedowns” of Foer and Wallace. I have to wonder instead whether the misogyny argument is absent because Hungerford had trouble placing an article about misogyny. In Making Literature Now, she notes that upon pitching an article about not reading Wallace on the grounds of misogyny, she was met with the advice to read more Wallace to find more misogyny. Hungerford sees this as an assumption “that Wallace’s work ‘about’ misogyny must somehow be revealing or smart about that subject.” This is the assumption that she wishes to interrogate.

I think he was more of a misanthrope than people generally realize and I stopped reading "Oblivion" because I found it kind of unpleasant. But the rape/consent metaphor this writer uses for refusing to read an allegedly misogynistic author is too loaded. And claiming the authority to mount a comprehensive takedown of an author without undertaking the labor of reading them is dumb.

I don’t think Hungerford is suggesting, here, that literature courses should never confront misogyny — or other iterations of hatred — but that seeing as teachers hold the readerly consent of their students in hand, they should choose their texts and authors carefully. To me, Hungerford’s affective-interpretive “worth” system reads as fair: if a reader must pay the cost of imbibing hatred, the author must offer the payback of equivalently potent critical “insight.” Any less is hatred for hatred’s sake. And hatred is worthless

This is such a transactional take on reader response theory. I don't think much good can come from analyzing literary texts as a balance sheet with "value" in one ledger and "cost" in the other. Isn't art supposed to be a repository for kinds of knowledge -- emotional, experiential -- that can't easily be translated into concepts (much less quantified)?

What do u think of that article j.?

making literature now...with McSweeney’s and Everything Is Illuminated and DFW? yuck. thanks, trump!

she must have been sitting on that book for a good ten years waiting for the right time to strike.

i re-read his tracy austin piece -- i think hes otm abt her just lacking introspection/depth; ive come to really like her as a commentator, shes astute but every bit of analysis is p surface level idk not knocking her

j. never explained what he thought about the tendentious la review of books piece he linked to.

Recently read Adrienne Miller's In the Land of Men and I am voting cunt

You push a woman out of a moving car, you’re an undeniable cunt

was she wheel shaped though?