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discussions of ‘new sincerity’ generally focus on a group of ‘post-baby-boomer’ authors who grew up in the 1970s, went to college and began writing in the heyday of high postmodernism and post-structuralism, with many subsequently honing their craft on postgraduate writing courses, and who came out the other side somewhat disaffected with both formal experimentalism and literary theory. 91 Rather than tell a simple story of a transition from postmodernism to post-postmodernism – as a study on, say, Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, Jennifer Egan, and Ben Lerner might – I
. As a kid and early teenager I loved Tolkien and anything ‘high-fantasy’ related, like Warcraft or The Elder Scrolls Series (which borrows heavily From ASOIAF ). As I grew older, most of the philosophical aspects of high-fantasy appeared very simplistic and it's often black or white characters seemed to me as only being representative one single world-view, or mythology. So I delved into more complex literature both classic (Dante, Shakespeare) and avant-garde (David Foster Wallace, Kracht etc.), while also keeping a high interest in archaeology and history. When
seems uniquely suited to the career of an author who landed a deal with William Faulkner’s editor and who gained status through access to luminaries who, for the most part also happened to be white American men, that’s because it is. 13 In a piece studying the impact of the MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grant on David Foster Wallace’s career, Alexander Rocca argues that ‘the MacArthur Foundation was the most visible representative [in the 1990s] of a radically new development in twentieth-century literature: the emergence of an institutional philanthropy’ that became the
novelist David Foster Wallace reflects on what it is to encounter scenes that we find disturbingly alien. ‘I like to judge’, Foster Wallace mused, ‘… we (I) like to feel powerful’ (1997: loc.3387). The alternative, he said, ‘requires that these features of ourselves and the world not be dreamed away or judged away or massaged away but acknowledged ’ (1997: loc.3437). The verb in italics is – probably uncoincidentally – one that was used in discussions between Michael Fried and the philosopher Stanley Cavell; Foster Wallace had attended classes with Cavell. For Cavell
about Helping Those in Need .” The American Scholar 75.2 (2006): 42+. Rpt. in The Best American Essays 2007. Editor David Foster Wallace. Houghton Mifflin, 2007 . 210–220 . —— What Are We Doing Here?: Essays . Farrar, Straus and Giroux , 2018 . —— When I Was a Child I Read Books . Farrar, Straus and Giroux , 2012 . Seelye , Katharine and Jeff Zeleny
February 2012, as a good starting point to enter this particular conversation. 3 Derek Hand, The History of the Irish Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 42–3. 4 Mark Tredinnick, ‘The Essential Prose of Things’, The Land’s Wild Music (San Antonio, TX: Trinity University Press, 2005), 34. Original emphasis. 5 ‘Lyric’ and ‘experimental’ non-fiction of the type that Americans John D’Agata, Jenny Boully, Lia Purpura, David Foster Wallace and others are known for is virtually non-existent in Irish non-fiction. 6 Shawn Gillen argues, ‘Travel writing has
you were breathing and feeling between your fingertips as these ashes fell on the city’ (Lethem, 2010c ). Hence Obstinate Dust , the monumental novel that appears many times during Chronic City as a playful allusion to David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996), testifies obliquely to the enduring material and sensory qualities of 9/11 and its aftermath. Like the towers and the birds, what
writers sought out ways to articulate earnest expressions of their day-to-day experiences, which stood in contrast to much of the cynicism and irony of late Soviet culture. Since that time, the concept of a ‘New Sincerity’ has been used to describe such disparate works as the literature of Vladimir Sorokin and Dmitri Vodennikov in Russia, as well as the writings of David Foster Wallace and the songs of the indie-rock band Bright Eyes in the US. New Sincerity rhetoric appears across the globe as it is often used in Anglophone writing to describe an aesthetic phenomenon
installation which records Simnett repeatedly passing out; and the ubiquitous use of *swoon* as an online ‘action’. I consider the latter in relation to the endemic irony David Foster Wallace referred to as ‘sardonic exhaustion’, and question what role swooning might have now in questions of the virtual, affect and embodiment. * I have tried in this study to cover a long sweep of literary history, in order to highlight modulations in literary depictions of swooning over time. I have tended to focus on well-known texts – texts that
). 6 See Nicholas Royle, ‘Even the Title: On the State of Narrative Theory Today’, Narrative , 22:1 (2014), 1–16: here, 6. This essay also includes some reflections on the writings of Elizabeth Bowen, David Foster Wallace and Don DeLillo in terms of the nanoment, as well as a somewhat differently oriented account of the narratoid (in the context of Joseph Conrad’s ‘Amy Foster’) and omnicisence (in the context of Jon McGregor’s Even the Dogs ). 7 Hélène Cixous, FirstDays of the Year , trans. Catherine A. F. MacGillivray (Minneapolis, MN: University of