Search results
The article notes a trend towards low-key naturalism in twenty-first-century independent queer cinema. Focusing on work by Andrew Haigh, Travis Mathews and Ira Sachs, it argues that this observational style is welded to a highly meta-cinematic engagement with traditions of representing non-straight people. The article coins the term ‘New Gay Sincerity’ to account for this style, relating it to Jim Collins’s and Warren Buckland’s writing on post-postmodern ‘new sincerity’. At its crux, this new style centres itself in realism to record non-metropolitan, intimate and quotidian gay lives, while acknowledging the high-style postmodernism of oppositional 1990s New Queer Cinema.
5 Burden of proof New Sincerity and the performance of post-Soviet national identities Questions about the nature of trust, sincerity, and belief in contemporary Russian culture run throughout the country’s twenty-first-century documentary theatre repertoire. In their varied interpretations of the form, Russia’s documentary theatre artists create performances that speak directly to the country’s cultural tensions between history, memory, and national identity. Each of the plays discussed in this book explores the contours of how Russia’s conflicted relationship
further below. The second is via a notion of a ‘simpler’ kind of film-making, which contrasts with omnipresent media clamour.18 Jim Collins’s argument about developments in Hollywood fiction film during the 1980s and 1990s can be usefully imported here. Collins locates what he calls a ‘new sincerity’ in film-making of this period – a trend exemplified in Dances With Wolves (US, 1990) – which he sees as a particular response to the background noise of the media array that surrounds us. (Another response is a playful engagement with the media-saturated landscape of
found in the writer's biography and of the ambiguous constructedness of the contemporary literary market. 2 Statements such as these, seen in the context of Wallace's literary corpus, have in fact been instrumental in the scholarly tendency to read Wallace as champion of a ‘New Sincerity’ in contemporary American literature (Kelly, 2010 ). 3
of irony’ – often invoked, shorthand, as postmodernism’s dominant affect – and in the emergence of a ‘new sincerity’ as a prominent contemporary cultural mode, capturing a ‘renewed wish to return ethical intent to literature’, and invested in ‘generating empathy, communal bonds, ethical and political questions’. 88 Indeed, this broader link between the contemporary novel and a renewed interest in ethics and politics is crucial to most critical descriptions of post-postmodernism. Robert McLaughlin, for example, analyses recent fiction attempting to ‘reenergise
some authentic relation with the past, retreating from and beyond the question of textual mediation (something that Collins relates to an adverse genre he calls ‘new sincerity’), films such as Back to the Future, Thelma and Louise, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Forrest Gump and Pleasantville are all defined by their use and manipulation of the multifarious images and texts that circulate in the
Kelly’s term for this mode of contemporary fiction is ‘new sincerity’ – another concept that owes a debt to Trilling – and he too traces Wallace’s engagement with Hyde’s work. 28 But Kelly also draws on Derrida’s Given Time to argue that Wallace’s understanding of the gift is more ‘double-edged’ than Hyde’s. 29 Pushing ‘Mauss’s thesis to its logical extreme’, Derrida argues that ‘the very fact that exchange is predicated on a structure of reciprocity and hence calculation renders [the gift] an impossibility’. 30 For Derrida, the gift ‘ought not to appear as gift
(e.g. Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves (1990). Alongside The Others , Willis places Guillermo del Toro’s El espinazo del Diablo (The Devil’s Backbone, 2001), seeing both films as examples of Collins’s notion of ‘new sincerity’ filmmaking. Both films, he argues, consolidated public acceptance of Hispanic horror as an appealing, transnational, mainstream product; both also enjoyed major commercial and critical success
's criticism of metafiction is perhaps the most-studied aspect of his work. I thus will not delve into it here. See Adam Kelly's seminal ‘David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in American Fiction’ ( 2010 ) as a point of entry into the matter. 5 Here I am citing a wide range of Wallace's work to highlight that Wallace made this argument throughout his career . This prevents me, however, from having space to analyse any one text in
authorial responsibility and commitment to questions of social and political relevance that has seen them described variously as part of the contemporary post-postmodern, metamodern or new sincerity. Indeed, it is the argument of this book that to turn to Kunzru in this contemporary moment is very much to unravel not only the work of the author, but also a much larger question regarding the future of the