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Existing accounts of the relationship between brevity and the literary have been historically permeated with ambiguity. In contemporary culture, fiction and scholarship, brevity and the semantically interrelated notions around it, such as simplicity, attention, or immediacy, have become a growingly contentious object of discussion. This article aims to contribute to existing accounts on brevity by focusing on how late twentieth century and early twenty-first century literature have problematized narrative’s relationship with length. To do so, it first reviews three existing papers on the matter of brevity in narrative: Norman Friedman’s “What Makes a Short Story Short?” (1958), Paul Zumthor’s “Brevity as Form” (1983), and William Nelles’ “Microfiction: What Makes a Very Short Story Very Short?” (2012). Departing from the analysis of these three texts and the demarcation of the tense visions of brevity and its characteristics that they reveal, this article argues that the simultaneous use of brevity-related (intensity, epiphanic closures, condensation, openness) and length-related (density, ergodicity, complexity, diachronicity) features can be attested to in contemporary prose fiction across genres. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes that a transformation of the New Sincerity aesthetics has taken place in Zadie Smith's short fiction. This shift is explored through an analysis of some of the short stories in Smith's most recent collection, Grand Union, opposite David Foster Wallace's "Octet", one of the foundational fictions of the literary New Sincerity. Their respective approaches to authenticity considered, Smith is argued to have partially departed from the other-directed concern with the reader that had shaped Wallace's outlook on sincerity, and thus to stand at a productive intersection between postmodernist form, the anticipatory disposition of New Sincerity aesthetes, and the unquestioned, unironic embrace of single-entendre values that Wallace prophesied for the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion of "New Sincerity" has become central to the study of David Foster Wallace's prose over the years. The present article explores how the tonal arrangement that characterises the movement has lived on to influence contemporary art, examining Bo Burnham's popular comedy musicals as a notable example of this influence. Wallace and Burnham's common stance concerning cultural reception is argued to be indissociable from their socio‐cultural setting, with the two authors articulating parallel responses to an ongoing, multifaceted process of massification of public opinion, as well as to the consequences to cultural poiesis therein entailed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]