WELCOME TO THE IRONY WARD.
It shouldn’t have been a surprise but somehow was when I first had readers email me to ask for recommendations to learn more about the New Sincerity. As I’ve explained before, I intended the title of this blog as an academic joke. If I had to place my writing along the ironic–sincere spectrum, I would locate it deep within the ironic camp; I use sincerity mostly as a means of trolling people I find dumb or feel are acting in bad faith. But I guess that even if I never committed to the bit, I at least committed to the brand.
When I began writing in 2021, I was witnessing the realignment in online political cultures with the fragmentation of the Online Left into the Post-Left and eventually the Dissident Right. At the time, I saw the defeat of the Bernie Sanders campaign as the end of the New Sincerity, as both a literary movement and a posture toward politics and culture. These two understandings had become entangled. For instance, Ben Lerner’s 10:04, a hallmark text of the New Sincerity, placed sincere hope in the prefigurative politics of Occupy Wall Street, so the defeat of Occupy’s politics in the form of Bernie seemed to undercut the political aspirations of this literary movement. Our cheers that “a better world is possible” became a resigned “well, never mind.” Having been defeated on the political stage, it was hard to see a future for this literary movement, even if individual works had been successful.
So it was surprising to me that the New Sincerity continued to interest people after I had, however flippantly, considered it, along with democratic socialism, a failed project. Of course, what it means for a literary movement to “fail” isn’t the same as what it means for a political campaign to fail. But even taken in a purely aesthetic sense, it seemed that the tentative steps that writers and artists made beyond postmodernism in the nineties and aughts were curtailed by our new technological environment. Social media totalized our aesthetic experience in a way that not even a Gen Xer like Lerner, publishing in 2014, seemed canny to. The endless feeds, the refusal of depth, the flattening of everything into “content,” the total commercialization of everyday life—regardless of what aspirations artists once had to exceed it, we were routed back to postmodernism.
Perhaps the continued interest in the New Sincerity emerges from still feeling trapped as an individual within a highly mediated environment. Zoomers in particular seem to have faith in a deliberate way of living in and thinking about the world, whether that’s through an intense focus on the body (e.g., ice baths, NoFap) or mental control (dopamine fasts, manifesting) that are often poised against “mindless” forms of online consumption (scrolling, porn). With its demands of attention and contemplation, literature by its very nature has a self-help function within this landscape, and the New Sincerity specifically offered a particular grammar for lived experience that didn’t flinch at the possibility of existential meaning for a post-religious generation.
On those grounds, I think the New Sincerity has the same appeal to sensitive literary types that Jordan Peterson has to his fans. If you think about it, David Foster Wallace and Peterson have much in common. They are derided for their appeal to young white men; were cast as “genius” figures; have lengthy oeuvres; made semi-secular turns to religion (DFW: Alcoholics Anonymous–inflected Protestantism; JBP: Judeo-Christian myth); shared deep concerns about the individual, the nature of suffering (particularly psychological suffering), and how this dynamic plays out in everyday life (DFW: “One day at a time”; JBP: 12 Rules); offered their audiences a kind of individualist ethics (DFW: commitment; JBP: responsibility); were born in the same year (1962) and emerged out of the Cold War with deep concern for the precariousness of the liberal order; and were disenchanted with postmodernism but saw in the humanities a way forward out of the morass of their cultural-historical moment. The differences in their prescriptions (DFW: empathy; JBP: self-responsibility) fell along a clear and rather predictable liberal–conservative divide.
I don’t intend to embarrass anyone with this comparison. Such characters appeal because they respond to genuine needs in their audiences, and I think the specific needs Wallace and Peterson address are for the most part worthy ones that postmodernism doesn’t have good solutions to.
For better or worse, many of the ideas, frames, and concerns of the New Sincerity have come to shape our aesthetic and intellectual responses to contemporary culture. When “heterodox” critics fulminate against the supposed ethical obligations of art, for instance, they are attacking a position that the writers of the New Sincerity took as their linchpin. When people identify someone’s political views as performative or virtue signaling, they are calling into question their sincerity. Indeed, one of the primary challenges to progressive activists hasn’t been whether they’re morally or intellectually wrong/right but whether they’re sincere in their beliefs and emotions (a conveniently difficult, if not impossible, standard to adjudicate in people you fundamentally distrust). Arguably, the opposite of sincerity within contemporary discourse isn’t irony—which is often the vessel of sincere beliefs—but narcissism. As I argued before, Greg Jackson brings the New Sincerity to a head in “Wagner in the Desert” when his narrator furiously jacks off on the bathroom floor while wondering if he’s a good person.
It may be better to abandon sincerity as a lodestar value—it does reek of a kind of crass Americanism—but it has become an implicit measure for contemporary phenomena up to and including selfhood, and so here we are.
Getting to the bottom of this sincerity sh*t.
My lengthy and self-indulgent introduction aside, this post is a review (overview?) of Adam Kelly’s upcoming monograph, New Sincerity: American Fiction in the Neoliberal Age. Kelly is the foremost scholar in this area and was a Wallace scholar earlier in his career. But I wanted to begin by describing the entanglements of the New Sincerity with contemporary politics, economics, individualism, ethics, and so on because I think one of the defining qualities of a literary movement, especially vis-à-vis a genre, is that it seeks to establish dialogues with other fields and alter the zeitgeist.
Whether the New Sincerity is the best term for this dialogue is roundly contested. Some scholars prefer post-postmodernism or metamodernism (variously defined or left undefined), and others seek to eschew the conceptual concerns of postmodernism and sincerity altogether by using the umbrella term "contemporary literature” instead to interrogate how literature conceives of the contemporary as such.
Kelly’s most important intervention in this volume is to place the New Sincerity within literary history and, in so doing, begin to specify its diffuse contours. Kelly focuses on the origins of the the movement by setting clear boundaries: his study treats only literary production during the period from Fukuyama’s declaration of the “end of history” in 1989 to the Global Financial Crisis in 2008 and specifically “post-boomer” writers (born between 1957 and 1972), including Wallace, Eggers, Egan, Whitehead, Saunders, DeWitt, Choi, and a few others. I would call this the first wave of New Sincerity writers, with a second wave, mainly of Gen Xers such as Lerner and Rachel Kushner and some millennials such as Jackson, carrying forth this movement after 2008 (though at times critically). Kelly, however, contends that the movement ended in the mid-aughts—cresting politically with Obama and economically with the financial crisis—though he allows that it has had some afterlife in both literature and culture more broadly.
His choice of this period allows him to situate the New Sincerity as a dialectical response to the rise and triumph of neoliberalism. (CTRL+F “dialectic” is a real doozy for this book.) Kelly takes his definition of sincerity from old guard literary scholar Lionel Trilling’s Sincerity and Authenticity (1972) as “a congruence between avowal and actual feeling,” and argues that sincerity is “a fundamentally social practice… [that is] not only other-directed but depends for its very possibility on acknowledgment by another, acknowledgment that is in significant part an act of trust.” But under neoliberal capitalism, both the possibility of acknowledgment (i.e., finding an audience) and “an act of trust” are mediated by the market—a mediation that undercuts the possibility of sincerity and truth by exposing them to commercial self-interest. Hence, for Kelly the “animating question” of the New Sincerity is:
Can sincere action be taken, and sincere art be created, under historical conditions anathema to both ethical conduct and artistic practice, when corporate capitalism and neoliberal ideology have rendered moral and aesthetic ends increasingly inseparable from economic ones?
To ground this question in a quick example, consider the apology videos YouTube influencers upload after a scandal. To prove their sincerity, they take pains to tell the audience that they demonetized their video and may even donate money to a philanthropic organization. They cry, don’t put on their makeup, say all the right words (or seem at loss for them), etc. The result is a strange admixture of a message that may or may not be sincere, a self-contradictory performance of sincerity, and an implicit desire to use their sincerity to maintain their audiences and, by extension, their careers. Under such conditions, can even the most sincere person actually be sincere? How can we trust what they’re saying?
This matter of trust proves significant to Kelly’s understanding of New Sincerity writers and helps to answer the question of why sincerity was so attractive in the first place. Postmodern literature had stalled out, and though its ironic conceits may have been inventive, these books often came to the same conclusions: truth is unstable, meaning is contingent and fleeting, life is absurd, etc. And maybe that could have gone on forever if it wasn’t that, in the meantime, capitalism was ratcheting up into its neoliberal form, bringing even more areas of life into the market and replacing liberal values with its own. If no one were to risk sincerity, then how could we defend even the value of literature except through recourse to sales numbers?
Through sincerity, writers would seek to forge a new contract with readers. New Sincerity wasn’t only a rejection of postmodernist’s overuse of irony, but also of modernism’s almost hostile preference for difficulty as a means of resisting the market and a commercial readership. By tacking to a more middlebrow aesthetic, New Sincerity writers would try to communicate directly with readers; Kelly likes to point out that these writers very frequently, especially in the final paragraphs of their books, use the second person to address readers directly. (For instance, 10:04 ends with the narrator saying, “I am with you, and I know how it is.”) Sincerity would force writers to consider their novels as an ethical relationship with individual readers, which took seriously the possibility that literature would and could change their lives in the same way that the imagined presence of the reader would shape the writing itself. As Zadie Smith observed, this literature wanted to do something “off the page.” Indeed, rather than an alienated act of consumption, these authors wanted their novels to co-produce meaning with its readers—a necessary condition for creating a shared system of values.
Consider it from another angle.
Marxist that he is (or what passes for it in English departments), Kelly emphasizes the economic elements that tilled the ground for the New Sincerity. I want to make a complementary argument slanted toward the political elements. Postmodern literature faced a crisis point at the end of the Cold War. In “The Literature of Exhaustion”—often understood as the “manifesto” for literary postmodernism—John Barth identifies “ultimacy” as the key theme of postmodern literature, an ultimacy born out of the concentration camps on the one hand and nuclear annihilation on the other. Consider the thematic architecture of Thomas Pynchon’s novels as a case in point: paranoia, conspiracy, war, and mass death.
At the end of the Cold War, with the US as the uncontested hegemon and the liberal order seemingly locked in (until the “discovery” of religious fundamentalism after 9/11), these themes no longer reflected contemporary life. Wallace’s insistence that American writers needed to give up on their ironic poses and grow up in some ways mirrored the liberal call for the US to assume its position of global responsibility over the post–Cold War global order. A culture of affirming “single-entendre” values was necessary to convince people to buy into a system that had no alternatives.
Wallace’s defense of sentimentality in his formulation of the New Sincerity is key to understanding this generation of writers. His famous commencement address, published as This Is Water, preaches empathy as a means of restoring the connective tissue between people that is so often torn asunder in “consumer-hell-type situation[s]” of modern life, e.g., traffic jams and grocery store lines. Saunders, in his own viral commencement address, makes a similar case for kindness. Late in the book, Kelly examines how these authors positioned these practical virtues against capitalist alienation, but I would tilt the emphasis differently and say that they were making the liberal case for post-historical democracy. After all, why do we need to feel any kind of civic regard, let alone genuine care, for other people when democracy is the only game in town? It may have once required fellow feeling among people to create the collective noun in “the people’s rule” or expand our conception of “the people,” but is it still necessary now that democracy has triumphed as the only viable political system? Let individuals find their fates in the free market—not with one another by sharing power.
Wallace, as Kelly notes, saw fascism as the specter haunting neoliberalism. The erosion of values, motivating principles, and spiritual conviction would result in a nihilism that fascism would come to fill. Viewed from this perspective, literary New Sincerity was a kind of liberal anti-fascism, with literature acting as a technology for cultivating the empathy and shared values necessary for democracy.
The other args
The ease with which you can elaborate Kelly’s literary history of the New Sincerity at once affirms that its shape is generally correct and calls attention to the additional work his account would have benefited from. His turn from literary history to literary theory in the rest of the book often has unpersuasive results, so forgive me for glossing over them. Academic literary criticism is kind of like yoga: though most of it unfolds within an acceptable and sometimes even skillful range of motion, to outsiders it just looks like a stretch. Yes, one could perform a Hegelian reading of Infinite Jest, as Kelly does in the first chapter, and sure, maybe the fiduciary logic of belief and David Harvey’s conception of the spatial/temporal fixes of global capitalism illuminate sincerity in the early works of Dave Eggers (so many Daves!), but what are we doing here?
So, kitten, I won’t bore you by getting further into these more scholarly debates. Kelly’s interest in neoliberalism at times veers off the rails, but at other times provides a guiding light for understanding the compromises of sincerity. Kelly notes that the ethical turn of the New Sincerity was at once “deeply informed by politics and economics” and also “a self-conscious acknowledgment of complicity.” Again, 10:04 offers the object lesson. The narrator wants to write a novel for a post-capitalist future, but his sincerity is undercut by his book contract, which, by its very nature, ties his not-yet-written novel to a future where capitalism still exists and can absorb his writing. The contract itself would seem to void the narrator’s literary aims. The New Sincerity, then, was a bargain that something that existed in excess in literature that couldn’t be commodified, even if literature was itself a product of the commodification process. This “excess” relied on the willingness of the reader to take the author in good faith—once more, the issue of trust.
There is, of course, reason to doubt. It doesn’t take Žižek to observe that this authorial fantasy may well protect one’s ethical self-image while enabling them to operate in and benefit from the status quo. Kelly finds this anxiety throughout New Sincerity literature, taking many different forms and finding different resolutions, but he is careful to allow the possibility of genuine conviction to cut through cynical reasoning and create with the reader a shared language. This is what Wallace saw in Alcoholics Anonymous maxims: the power of language to build faith between and transform people.
Some scholars haven’t been as generous as Kelly in reading the anxieties of New Sincerity novels. One critic, notably, called Lerner’s narrator a crypto-conservative (lmao) following Žižek’s logic, and another has railed against the entire notion of aesthetic compromise on which the New Sincerity, and much of contemporary literature (including the “genre turn”), was built. The New Sincerity’s greatest critic, Lee Konstantiou, opens his book by enumerating the ways that Wallace misunderstood irony. More helpfully, he distinguishes the New Sincerity from the earlier counterculture to show how the former overemphasizes belief rather than follows the latter by trying to take or challenge power. The result is that we’ve created a “postironic Bildungsroman” in which the map for individual maturity begins with naïve sincerity, curdles into bitter irony, before finally evening out transcendent postirony, where the pursuit and declaration of genuine belief makes actual power unnecessary. Case in point: Obama.
To his credit, Kelly admits that the New Sincerity can permit a kind of hollowness. Fundamentally, it is an aesthetic sensibility, and this sensibility might be informed by politics, economics, and ethics, but they don’t determine its content. Tao Lin, The Office, and Bright Eyes, Kelly argues, “simultaneously invoke and defy the constraints of form, genre, modes of dissemination, and a jaded cultural environment in order to elicit moments of sincere affect against the odds,” but this affect yields nothing beyond itself—merely a kind of twee self-congratulation.
While such exceptions exist, the defining characteristic for Kelly will always be that sincerity shouldn’t be an end in itself but must reach out to the reader. Only in this act of trust between people can literature escape the grasp of the market.
To the extent that the New Sincerity can be said to be “over”—again, sincerity itself seems to have a firm place as a value of aesthetic judgment—it is not, alas, because of the strength of leftist academics. The autopsy allows for many interpretations. It could be that increasing distrust of conglomerate publishing has disabled any kind of belief that contemporary literature is more than a commodity. Or that all the mawkish and false sincerity of social media has eroded our belief in it. Or that seeing so many people fall victim to charismatic figures and fringe political movements and go off the fucking edge of conspiracy has made us warier. Or it could be, as I suggested earlier, that the implicit political basis for the New Sincerity has crumbled, so sincerity only exists now as an “affect against the odds.”
Whatever the case, our moment seems vulnerable to a general distrust, and yet—maybe I’m just speaking of myself—this distrust hasn’t completely outweighed the desire to find someone who says, “I am with you, and I know how it is,” dangerous as it might be.
Based Substacker DESTROYS literary critics
I’ll let you co-construct your criticisms with Kelly on these points or w/e. My aim has been to elucidate the New Sincerity for the youngins in my inbox, not to offer a critique of it. So I want to draw out a specific point in closing.
As I said, the chief virtue of Kelly’s book is that it risks specificity in an amorphous and heterogenous domain like contemporary literature. This endeavor is praiseworthy and necessary, so it feels ungrateful to criticize the book’s scope………….. but surely if the literary New Sincerity lasted for only 19 years but then continued to have an afterlife of 16+ years (read Houellebecq’s most recent novel, Annihilation, and tell me that it isn’t a sincere defense of sentimentalism) and found its “off the page” manifestation in political movements that occurred more than a decade after its zenith, then claiming that its endpoint lies in or around 2008 is a little historically reductive. Kelly seems to realize this in the conclusion of his book, but immediately jumps ship.
Any full account of the New Sincerity will likely have to treat it in three waves. Kelly covers the first, culminating politically with Obama. The second will have to grapple with alt lit, autofiction, and twee, among other minor literary movements associated with Gen X and millennials. A specific current within this second wave departs from Wallace’s “anti-rebel” sensibility and the end-of-history liberalism of the first wave, and as such, it finds its political expression in Occupy, Bernie, and BLM. The third is currently emergent and can be glimpsed in weird, Very Online, bastard terms like hypersincerity and meta-irony. D i a l e c t i c a l l y , it isn’t tied to liberal/left political sensibilities and includes some stripes of reaction. (Isn’t being “based” at its heart calling sincerefags on their bluff?) In that sense, perhaps Honor Levy’s My First Book is on the frontier of something.
Well, that’s grim to think about.
At any rate, I think such a model will prove more accurate than Kelly’s formulation that the genre turn has superseded the New Sincerity (after the latter tilled the ground for it). Certainly, the attraction of literary writers to genre fiction—Bret Easton Ellis to thriller, Sally Rooney to romance, Colson Whitehead to post-apocalypse, Junot Díaz to SciFi—is a notable trend within contemporary fiction, but perhaps it should be considered within the scope of the New Sincerity, or as an offshoot, rather than its successor.
I make these contentions strictly as a literary historian. As a reader, I have no real attachment to the New Sincerity as a project and agree that something feels passé about it. I think the rising interest in modernist techniques and storytelling among contemporary writers globally—as in Jon Fosse’s Septology, Rooney’s Intermezzo, Anna Burns’s Milkman, and Mircea Cărtărescu’s Solenoid—is more intriguing, even as I find the vague modernism that so-called heterodox literary critics seem (often unknowingly) to wield against “corporate literature” to be limp and self-flattering. (We need something genuinely new to disrupt the sameness saturating contemporary culture, they declare. Bitch, “newness” has been done before! What do you think modernism was??) But even if it isn’t newness as such, maybe there is something within the increasingly discredited modernist project that’s worth returning to and, indeed, taking sincerely.
Against another issue beloved by these critics, straw men though they might be, I believe that people wanting moral instruction from art is a great and beautiful honor. How it should be met requires a complicated response and may not reduce to just giving it to them, but we shouldn’t revile readers for it. Indeed, a flat-out refusal, I think, shows the poverty and infantilism of contemporary artists and critics, not readers. If the New Sincerity writers risked anything, it’s faith in people’s willingness to let literature change their lives. Not even the “death” of literature has fully extinguished this belief among readers. Literature should aspire to go beyond “ambiguity” as its highest moral aim and attempt genuine courage. If the New Sincerity has any afterlife, I hope it’s this.
Love always,
Daniel
PS: