Such techniques, including meta-discursive stuff, self-reference, irony, black humor, cynicism, grotesquerie and shock, it would be safe to say that television or televisual values rule the culture. Television is successfully using a lot of those same techniques but using them for a very different agenda, which is to sort of create an ethos and please people and to sell products to consumers.

The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates.

We're not keen on the idea of the story sharing its valence with the reader. But the reader's own life "outside" the story changes the story.

There's good self-consciousness, and then there's toxic, paralyzing, raped-by-psychic-Bedouins self-consciousness.

My chest bumps like a dryer with shoes in it.

She took a sort of abject pride in her mecilessness toward herself.

Why not? Why not?Why not not, then, if the best reasoning you can contrive is why not?