David Foster Wallace on Toxic Postmodernism

I have revisited David Foster Wallace and what I appreciate about him is that he critiques the postmodern hyper sarcasm and cynicism...too much of it can be a paralyzing force... it makes me think of the era of the Simpsons, Family Guy, and South Park where nothing is real, genuine, sacred, or meaningful...

“What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human [...] is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic.” ― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

"Postmodern irony and cynicism's become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what's wrong, because they'll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony's gone from liberating to enslaving. There's some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who's come to love his cage… The postmodern founders' patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years."

“There's good self-consciousness, and then there's toxic, paralyzing, raped-by-psychic-Bedouins self-consciousness.”

David Foster Wallace