Via Salon from Luke Epplin, Congratulations, by the way: David Foster Wallace, George Saunders and fighting the TED Talks-ization of commencement speeches - Commencement addresses are TED Talks, all humblebraggy and eager to go viral. DFW and Saunders make them real again:
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It’s not a coincidence that the addresses given by David Foster Wallace and George Saunders were selected for publication. Both literary authors have amassed unusually large and dedicated readerships. It’s hard to imagine that any writer of short stories other than Saunders would be asked to appear on such coveted programs as “The Late Show With David Letterman” and “The Colbert Report.” Wallace’s reputation as a tormented genius who grappled with the cacophony of our media-saturated age has only grown since his 2008 suicide. His plainspoken commencement address to the 2005 graduating class of Kenyon College was perhaps the most accessible bit of writing he produced; as a result, it’s been celebrated widely as a portal into the larger philosophical questions that animated his life and work. At the popular site Brain Pickings, Maria Popova asserted that Wallace’s address peels back “the curtain on the triumphs and tragedies of being David Foster Wallace.”[...]
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