While Konstantinou's critique of ir

While Konstantinou's critique of irony in Infinite Jest makes sense in the context of Fukuyama's Hegelian dialecticism that stresses synthesis and teleology, my understanding of Infinite Jest in the context of the encyclopedic novel follows more closely the Blakean dialectic that Frye theorizes in many of his works and the cyclical modal progression that Frye also presents.109 I do agree that there is a shift in the context of the use of irony from writers like Pynchon to Wallace, but I argue that this is the result of Wallace's interactions with postmodern irony, and not an extension of the same sort of irony or even the result of a shift to “post-irony.” The synthesis of postmodern irony and Wallace's integrative irony does not efface postmodern irony, but continues to contend with it and combat it from a position beyond the instability of postmodern irony.