"The Real Dark Side, Baby": New Sincerity and Neoliberal Aesthetics in David Foster Wallace and Jennifer Egan. Issue 4 (7th August 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Lambert, Stephanie
• Is Part Of: Critique. Volume 61:Issue 4(2020)
• Page Start: 394
• Page End: 411
• Publication Date: 2020-08-07
• Subjects: Fiction -- 20th century -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; Letterkunde; Engels; Electronic journals; 809.304
• DOI: 10.1080/00111619.2020.1727831
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0011-1619

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This article analyzes the putative turn to New Sincerity, post-irony, or "post-postmodernism" in contemporary US literature identified by critics such as Adam Kelly and Lee Konstantinou. Taking David Foster Wallace's 1997 collection of short stories Brief Interviews with Hideous Men as my exemplar of "New Sincerity, " I propose that Wallace's "sincere" aesthetics valorize the cultural logics of neoliberalism, drawing on Robin James and Jane Elliott's concepts of "resilience discourse" and "suffering agency" to do so. Even as his work exhibits skepticism toward the concept of sincerity, Wallace presents it as a corrective to the pitfalls of postmodern culture, staging spectacles of gendered violence to reinstate the "reality" and sincerity apparently destroyed by postmodernism. I then turn to Jennifer Egan's novel Look at Me (2001), which, like Wallace's fiction, features "anti-postmodernist" characters who are plagued by the inauthenticity of the post-industrial world they inhabit. In contrast to Brief Interviews, I argue, Egan's text exposes the misogyny that underlies the quest for sincerity and foregrounds the specifically gendered consequences of the forms of value extraction inaugurated by neoliberal capital.