The sentimentality-versus-cynicism argument in its mature 2006 form — sentimentality colonized by cynical commercial…
echoes
From: DFW on Consider the Lobster — Bookworm with Michael Silverblatt, KCRW (March 2, 2006)
- Early text:
[scene] Wallace argues the reception environment for
art has grown vastly more cynical and overhyped [25:27]; his writing
students fear seeming sentimental far more than seeming twisted,
obscene, or gross [25:27]; sentimentality now belongs mainly to cynical
marketing and mass-entertainment devices that manhandle inattentive
audiences' emotions, so genuine treatment of grief and loss has been
adulterated almost out of reach [25:27–26:39]. The frame is his
two-problems account: alongside the perennial what-is-it-to-be-human
problem sits a rhetorical/technical one — art as public communication
designed to please, gratify, and edify, answerable to what will land as
true in a given year, not only to what is true for the writer
[23:06–25:27].
- IJ echo: the announced-key passage on hip cynicism versus the fear
of being really human (p. 694 per the archive's entry for this crux),
plus the E Unibus Pluram sentimentality/anti-rebel program the archive pairs with it (e-unibus-pluram).
- Weight: shared-preoccupation