The New Yorker has a lengthy article on David Foster Wallace, noting among other things that "Wallace worried that he had been driven by a “basically vapid urge to be avant-garde . . . and linguistically calisthenic.”
Much contemporary writing and literary criticism seems to be under the "vapid" spell of the avant-garde (read: post-modernism and post-post modernism and whatever other post-isms are in vogue in lit studies these days), but Wallace was among the few to openly admit it.
