Poor David

On David Foster Wallace's Losing Battle with Postmodernity

Talk about meta—two Carnival Lines photo-advertisements from the New York Public Library Picture Collection reproduced by Harper’s Magazine on Substack in 2025 in reference to DFW’s 1996 article in the actual Harper’s Magazine about his experiences (sort of) on a luxury cruise line.

First off, I love postmodernity.*

*Definition: an era**

**which we may still be in; I am agnostic on the question of whether postmodernity is still the dominant paradigm of American life in 2025. I’ll leave this to the philosophers.

*in which many—most?—Americans shifted from viewing things as things, and began to see most things as representations of things. And while I am not a historian**

**although, in fact, I am.

*I would argue that we hit peak postmodernity in the 1980s and 1990s. Between 1980 and 2000, I spent the first sixteen years of my life in the rapture of this postmodern excess. I reveled in it. I loved the ironic, self-referential, and intertextual aspects of television—advertisements and otherwis…