New sincerity
A loose aesthetic and literary movement, articulated most famously by David Foster Wallace in his essay "E Unibus Pluram", calling for an end to the reflexive irony and metafictional games of late twentieth-century postmodernism in favour of a renewed willingness to risk earnestness, vulnerability, and emotional commitment. The challenge it identifies is recursive: once irony is the default mode, any attempt at sincerity can itself be read as an ironic pose, creating a double bind that sincere art has to find a way through.
Episodes
- 66. Raymond Carver: Cathedrals even for those without eyes to see
- 54. Crashing out of Gravity's Rainbow: A postmortem of our first DNF
- 42. Everything is Illuminated: Cultural Learnings of Trachimbrod for Make Benefit Glorious Book Club
- 29. Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle: Autofiction and autofellation
- 20. Albert Camus' The Fall: Signalling, scrupulosity, and pathological self-awareness
- 10. Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, part 2: If you can fake sincerity you've got it made
- 9. David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, part 1: Weaponised therapy-speak