Word: jedediah
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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Another young author, Jedediah Purdy, last year published For Common Things, about the threat of the "ironic individual," possessed of acute self-awareness and mistrust, which, Purdy argued, led to cynicism. Heartbreaking Work is a resounding rebuttal. In it, literary gamesmanship and self-consciousness are trained on life's most unendurable experience, used to examine a memory too scorching to stare at, as one views an eclipse by projecting sunlight onto paper through a pinhole. This is not irony obscuring sincerity. It is, finally, irony in the service of sincerity...