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Comment by gglover | Hacker News Reader

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gglover·

Real life:

"Did you read Infinite Jest?"

"No"

"Okay"

Academia:

"Did you read Infinite Jest?"

"My small act of countercultural scholarly agency has been to refuse to continue reading or assigning the work of David Foster Wallace. The machine of his celebrity masks, I have argued, the limited benefits of spending the time required to read his work. Our time is better spent elsewhere. I make this assessment given the evidence I have so far accumulated"

"Okay"

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This comes off as one of the more annoying articles I've ever read in my entire life.

It's written by a literary academician for other literary academicians. Of course it's enormously verbose and laden with jargon.

So of course nobody wants to read it. Which works rather well with the title of the piece...

After about two paragraphs I chose not to read it.

I'm glad I'm not the only one.

Tell me about it:

>Coming from a critic, this confession sounds both imperious and ignorant

Ugh. Nobody cares about your title or your perceptions on what you should and shouldn't say based on it. How about just state your thesis and let the reader decide how to interpret it.

>My small act of countercultural scholarly agency has been to refuse to continue reading or assigning the work of David Foster Wallace.

Swerve, academia. We're dealing with a rebel here.

My first reaction was to beg for the evidence

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