Date of Award

5-1-2024

Language

English

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

College/School/Department

Department of English

Dissertation/Thesis Chair

Paul Stasi

Committee Members

Mathias Nilges, Erica Fretwell

Keywords

American literature, contemporary literature, New Sincerity, postmodern literature, postmodernism, poststructuralism

Subject Categories

American Literature

Abstract

Since the publication of David Foster Wallace’s essay, “E Unibus Plurum,” in 1993, critics have attended ever more closely to the problematic effects of postmodernism. Postmodernism, with its origins located in poststructuralism’s antifoundational philosophy, fashions a world without anchors or boundaries, where relativism holds sway and irony is the culture’s habitus. The twin concepts of relativism and irony are, of course, primary in postmodern literature, and therefore indicate why postmodernism’s trajectory terminates in overt metafiction, experimental excess, and nihilism. By reading postmodernism as a reflection of these principles, we begin to register how the literature of the period following postmodernism resists its predecessor by seeking out a means through which to solve the twin conceptual problems of irony and relativism. I Know Not Seems: Contemporary American Fiction and the New Sincerity, argues that sincerity serves as that means, and is thus a major periodizing concept for contemporary American literary fiction, codified in the New Sincerity movement. Functioning as both a heuristic solution to relativism and a pointed response to irony, sincerity is evident across many recent works of literary fiction, as not only a thematic element but also as a characterological and formal one. Moreover, by attending to the central place that sincerity holds in today’s literature, as well as to the nature of sincerity itself, we gain a greater understanding of how New Sincerity literature has sought to negotiate the epistemological and ontological crises imposed by poststructuralism’s antifoundational principles, and therefore to return to the culture a sense of both a truth and a reality seemingly lost to postmodernism.

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