L’insufficienza della diagnosi. David Foster Wallace, Julian Barnes e la satira della narrativa postmodernista

Since the 1960s, postmodernist fiction, through the works of novelists such as John Barth, Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, has had the merit of carrying out a diagnosis of the cultural dominance of media-transmitted images and of mass consumerism. It is possible to argue that, in the course of the 1990s, it has appeared the need, both in literature and in theory, to start building new ways of experiencing the last resort of disillusionment. This article has the purpose of understanding how two authors such as the American David Foster Wallace (Westward the Course of The Empire Takes its Way, 1989) and the British Julian Barnes (England, England, 1998) appear deeply aware of the postmodern tradition that preceded them, while they seem to exploit their novels in order to make a discourse about postmodernism, criticizing the current inadequacy of a mere aesthetics of cynicism.