Remember yesterday’s item about the auction that’s being conducted right now over the unheralded genius of American letters whose work “will permanently alter the landscape of publishing and the consciousness of the Western reader”? At the time, I thought this passage from the agent’s pitch letter was just easily mockable posturing on behalf of his client:
“In 1962, John Barth pronounced the death of the novel. In 1967, Tom Wolfe proclaimed the death of journalism. In the past two years, critic Slavoj Zizek and author James Frey have shaken the status of the memoir.”
Well, it is easily mockable posturing, but it’s also wrong, wrong, wrong. Barth’s “The Literature of Exhaustion” actually appeared in The Atlantic in 1967, and while I figured that, having escaped the clutches of postmodernism over a decade ago, I had simply missed a Zizek essay undermining subjectivity or some such, people who actually know about these things suggest it probably has something to do with the Zizek! documentary, the effect of which on the memoir is dubious.
(If you can pin down the dates on the Wolfe thing, by all means, chime in.)