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The article localizes the problem of interscientific system methodology in the study of a new social practice domain, which manifests itself in the form of the trend towards sincerity and frankness in language interaction. The purpose of the article is to consider the issues that arise within the overlapping scientific approaches in the context of polyparadigmality in linguistics. The article describes vectors and scenarios of discipline interaction, as well as the examples of interdisciplinary transfer practice. The author presents the concept of rhizomic interdisciplinarity as a nonlinear development of scientific research that contains the potential for differentiation and integration. The system methodology application has enabled the author to build the core part of the model for describing linguistic facts. It includes some clusters of scientific knowledge that are undergoing a development phase. The article outlines the problems of “new sincerity” with an emphasis on network communication. For illustration, data from social events with elements of a flash mob, cases of cancel culture and eco-alarmism were used. The patterns that form a social community in the form of thematic fashion, Internet communication algorithms, and mobilizing potential are indicated. The author presents several clusters of research into the phenomenon of “new sincerity” from the perspective of the science of language. Being indicative of the dynamics of interaction amongst currently existing approaches and theories, they can form the core of the research model.

The article represents the peculiarities of “new sincerity” discursive representation in a media text. The research into this phenomenon from sociocultural angle presupposes conducting a multifaceted analysis, in particular, in communicative-and-cognitive and communicative-and-discursive perspectives. It is shown that the willingness of a linguistic personality to share their own thoughts and feelings in the public space is manifested in the generation of media discourse of “new sincerity”. The referential aspects of the “new sincerity” are revealed. The author establishes a repertoire of denotative-identifying reference (concrete, abstract referents, referent event), and a set of subject-marked text reference (emotive, evaluative referents). The explication of “new sincerity” is proved to become a tool of linguistic creative activity, as a result of which discourse scenarios are generated. They are focused on influencing the addressee (explication of personal significance, hypersensitivity). The macrostructural positions of the radio discourse of the “new sincerity” are revealed: lead, detailing, evaluative, emotionally oriented parts. Thematic dominants that form the discursive field of “new sincerity” are identified: “everyday life”, “life’s troubles”, “demonstration of weaknesses, inability”, “personal achievements and failures”, “personal preferences, secrets, qualities, interests, habits”, “fears and phobias”, “desires and dreams”, “details of personal life”. The television and radio discourses are rich in emotionally and personally oriented topics and concepts of sincerity, which leads to a change in the status of sincerity and sensitivity from peripheral phenomena to discourse-forming ones. It determines significant functional, qualitative changes in television and radio discourse.

The article deals with the techniques of building a dialogue in the interview genre that encourage the interlocutor to be sincere. The intrusion of a journalist into the addressee’s private space, as well as the interviewee’s expression of their own identity through answers to “uncomfortable” questions can be considered as the discursive indicators for determining whether a text belongs to the tendency of “new sincerity” described in the present paper. The material of the study includes text fragments from the interviews of the Russian journalists with famous cultural figures and politicians published in the media or posted on the Internet platforms within the period of 2018–2023. It has been established that in order to determine the markers of “new sincerity” in the genre of a journalistic interview, one should consider the following essential discursive characteristics: thematic variety, methods of requesting (finding out) information by a journalist, the interlocutor’s reaction to a question that is on the borderline between public and private communication, techniques of euphemization and implication/explication of taboo meanings. “New sincerity” is found, first of all, in the expanded zone of thematic freedom acceptable in public communication. The main topics discussed in journalistic interviews, which reveal this trend (finances, health, appearance, etc.) are described in the article. The subject of the study is various methods of stimulating the “confessional” statement of the interlocutor and their latter’s reaction to violations of the acceptable boundaries of sincerity in public communication. The study also reveals metalinguistic markers of “new sincerity” that represent the strategies of speech behavior of both the journalist and their interlocutor. The results of the study show that “new sincerity” is becoming a technology that is used in mass media as a tool to influence the audience; thereby it shapes the communicative culture of the society in the public space.

The article presents the results of a study on the phenomenon of “new sincerity” examined on the material of posts on social networks (about 2 thousand contexts in total). It has been noticed that while in registered media the phenomenon mainly exists as initiated by the journalist (in the genres of interviews with famous people), in social media it acts as an initiative of the author. The object of the study was the intentions of the authors of the posts, manifested in their speech, as well as the feedback that the authors received in response to their confession. The discursive approach used in the study has demonstrated the correlation between the topics of confessional posts and the general tasks of public social networks, between author’s intentions and word usage. Thus, feminist public accounts are created specifically to demonstrate those aspects of women’s life in society that have not been publicly discussed before. Borrowed vocabulary is widely used in such cases, as well as words that belong to the field of psychotherapy. Confessional posts on the authors’ personal accounts are much rarer, more varied in topic, most often aimed at creative self-expression and focused on a circle of familiar people. The types of addressees’ reactions to confessional posts are characterized: from distrust of what has been said to support with a demonstration of their similar experience and advice. The research contributes to the development of communication studies in general and media text linguistics in particular.

The ideographic description of new vocabulary and the linguistic units within the lexical-and- semantic field of the idiom new sincerity in particular, is being considered. It is noted that in addition to its cultural significance, this expression has also acquired two new meanings: marketing technology and communicative practice. It is precisely in these meanings that the idiom new sincerity is studied in this research. Using component, contextual, and interpretive methods of analysis, with the support of the ideographic dictionary compiled by one of the authors and examples of usage in media discourse texts, the vocabulary within the lexical-and-semantic field of “new sincerity” has been identified and described. Most of the linguistic units in this group have been established to be neologisms. The presented ideographic network has a frame structure and reflects the fragments of modern reality represented in the linguistic worldview by new vocabulary. The authors have identified 5 segments (slots) of the ideographic network: “new sincerity” as a tactic in internet communication, social-and-political communication, as a basis for uniting people, a form of expressing aggression, and as a communicative practice in the conditions of the coronavirus pandemic. Each segment includes a set of ideograms that unite lexical representatives – neologisms. It is noted that the expression new sincerity is not used in Chinese media texts. However, there has been an increasing interest in open expression of feelings and sharing personal stories by participants in modern Chinese shows, which corresponds to the practice of “new sincerity” in virtual and real life.

The relevance of the study is determined by the demand for “new sincerity” that has emerged in society. Reflecting modern trends, mass media highlight the urgency of research into this phenomenon from various angles. The purpose of the work is to describe mass media potential for the use of irony and post-irony as means of expressing “new sincerity”. The analysis is carried out on the material of modern intellectual periodicals The Rules of Life (formerly Esquire) and The New Yorker, which represent a striking example and an integral part of postmodern culture, create and communicate its values. The novelty of the study lies in the integrated approach that enabled the authors to describe the linguistic mechanisms of transforming irony to post-irony and to prove the capability of the “new sincerity” concept extrapolation to the sphere of mass media through determining the characteristic features of irony and post-irony that reflect new communicative strategies. An empirical study identifies lexical, syntactic, stylistic, graphic means of post-irony expression in modern intellectual periodicals and allows to conclude that it is represented in pathos and categoricity reduction, explicit criticism and sarcasm elimination, as well as transition from the irony of rejection to the post-irony of sensitivity, frankness and sympathy. Post-irony is shown to constitute the style of intellectual periodicals while the magazines themselves are noted to be the bearers of the “new sincerity” philosophy.

The aim of the article is to analyze pragmatic strategies and mechanisms to enhance narrative empathy, the key notion of metamodernist fiction that distinguishes it from postmodernist and modernist literary texts. The article postulates foregrounding of emotivity markers in metamodernist texts as a linguistic manifestation of the cultural logic of “new sincerity” in the contemporary fiction that is characterized by the lack of an explicit ludic modality of postmodernist fiction and by stressing means of producing emotional resonance on the part of the reader and their active perspective-taking. The article makes an original contribution to cognitive stylistics, multimodal studies and narratology by hypothesizing polyphony of narrative “voices”, second-person narrative and visual foregrounding as effective pragmalinguistic tools of triggering emotive and cognitive empathy that increases reader’s immersion in metamodernist fictional worlds. Using the novels by M. Porter and J. Egan, the short stories by J.S. Foer and D. Eggers as its case studies, the article proves the relevance of viewing the “new sincerity” concept as a driving force behind the authorial empathy towards fictional characters, which enhances emotionogenic potential of metamodernist fiction and contributes to reader’s engagement with modeled emotive situations. The findings of the research testify to the importance of further research into “new sincerity” and potential mechanisms of inducing reader’s empathy which is justly considered a powerful instrument for promoting social interaction, helping readers of all ages to inhibit aggression and develop understanding of others’ motives, emotions and desires.

Changes in modern communication have led to the transformation of the category of sincerity into a technology (or strategy) of persuasive influence. Increased sensitivity and the illusion of displaying genuine emotions are used not for frank self-expression, but for achieving commercial, ideological, and other goals. In the article, “new sincerity” is examined from the perspective of communication theory and the understanding of effective strategies by communication participants. It is argued that “new sincerity” has several variations with different sets of substantive components. Four models of new sincerity are characterized, each structured according to the significant components identified during the analysis: the scope of the concept of sincerity, the subject of sincerity, the object of influence, the instrument of influence, the conceptual core (integral component), qualifiers of the concept, type of activity; means of carrying out the activity; expected result of the activity. The assumption is made that variations in understanding the linguistic unit new sincerity have emerged as a result of the universality of its structural-and-semantic contour. It is suggested that the word sincerity originally had potential for future transformations due to the practical properties of the reality it denotes. It is shown that the awareness of the unique properties of sincerity has led to its transformation into insincere sincerity as a technology for attracting audiences of different types with different goals.

The review examines the critical reception of David Foster Wallace’s personality and works. A particular attention is paid to the appreciation of David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) in foreign criticism as an intellectual, religious writerphilosopher and a martyr (“Saint Dave”), whose works require deep analysis, and as a writer whose popularity is the result of marketing manipulations and publisher’s work, which has nothing to do with his talent. According to some researchers, it was market specialists who created his iconic image as the most important American writer of the turn of the millennium, and his books are unlikely to become classics. Others consider him the author who caused a “revolution” in literature, being the first to oppose postmodernist ironic and cynical attitudes. The paper reviews books dedicated to Wallace's personality, his religious, ethical and philosophical views, as well as studies based on the archive of David Foster Wallace. Attention is also paid to Russian-language critical works, although it is largely based on the above-mentioned foreign criticism. It is concluded that to a large extent the difference in opinion is caused by the identification of the writer with the man, whose life was complicated by the struggle with addiction and depression, as well as by the analysis of his works based on his personality. It is emphasized that Wallace's works are important for contemporary literature, and they are to be studied objectively, without deifying / demonizing Wallace or elevating him to the ranks of suffering geniuses.

The article explores the leading metamodernist features evident in the autobiographical novel ‘A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius’ (2001) by a contemporary American writer Dave Eggers. The purpose of this study is to identify the characteristic features of metamodernism in contemporary works on the basis of an interpretive analysis of D. Eggers’ autobiographical novel “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius”, to determine ways of their original implementation in this novel. The review of theoretical sources confirms the significance of Eggers’ works in the development of key trends in the new cultural paradigm of post-postmodernism. The author can be attributed to a galaxy of American writers who fully embody the tenets of metamodernism. A practical analysis of the selected novel for study allows for the assertion that the main characteristics of metamodernism in the examined novel can be identified as the following elements: a revival of the author’s role, post-irony, new sincerity, and neo-realism. To embody these artistic elements, the author employs various literary techniques such as the contamination of artistic and documentary elements, meta-narration and meta-meta-narration, and the fusion of realistic and romantic perceptions of reality. Eggers explores traditional themes of family values, friendship, responsibility, and finding one's place in life through a new metamodern lens.

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 theme of ‘new sincerity’ in literature is considered on the material of the novel “The Language of Flowers” by the American writer Vanessa Dieffenbach, published in 2011. The relevance of the study lies in the keen interest of literary scholars in the 21st century to the issues of ‘new sincerity’ and florpoetics. It is shown that in Dieffenbach modern novel, these themes are revealed through the reconstruction of the ancient secular tradition and the literary genre “language of flowers”. The author of the article traces the history of the formation of ‘new sincerity’ literature at the end of the XX — early XXI centuries. On the example of V. Dieffenbach’s novel, signs of ‘new sincerity’ literature are revealed in fragments of the novel related to the “language of flowers” (as floral communication between heroes), the botanical theme and the recreation of the novel heroines of the forgotten literary genre history of the 19th century with the corresponding name. It has been established that in the past the “language of flowers” was necessary to veil one’s feelings, and in the present, when people lack live communication, it helps to open up. In the conclusion, the author of the article points out the features that characterize V. Dieffenbach’s novel as the literature of ‘new sincerity’. Among them are the emotionality of the text, the search for new means of communication between people, the appeal to Christian values and the tradition of the “language of flowers”, which helps people communicate with each other.

This article makes the case for confessional genre as a contemporary African literary form afforded by the intersection of politics, affect and mediatory conventions. I argue that contemporary Nigerian youths, through intimate and sincere revelatory writing practices, model heterotopic structures as correctives to normative orders, and that such Foucauldian spaces, contentiously expressed as space-within-a-space, are realised in, and materialise as, digital literary anthologies. Rethinking the literary anthology as heterotopia discloses seeming incompatible valences in confessional praxis and genre as constituting the kernel of a resistive commune. I tease out such valences by drawing on existing conceptions of publics and heterotopia and reading Thursday's Children (Adeosun & Bello 2019), a digital anthology of personal essays, as confessional public. The article thinks through genre's capture by technological regimes, capital and multiple economies of circulation to render confessional public's techniques of mobilisation. These incompatibilities comprise the anthology's materiality as negotiating a fusion of aesthetics, feelings-based subjectivity, intimacy and vulnerability. Troubling the ethics of a captured genre renders the paradoxical manoeuvres in writerly practices that hold up shared affective codes of belonging as baselines for agonistic literacies. The article theorises confessional writing as registers of predicaments and emotions whose constitutive contradictions bond writers and their audience to create feelings of intimacy and public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting from the ancient concept of mimesis to the view on authenticity of realist writers, this article aims to follow the evolution of approaches to the problem of authenticity within the framework of literary history. We will delimit the character of authenticity of literatures of different periods by means of literary theory texts, but also by referencing some of the most known and/or suggestive works of literature. We will emphasize the differences and similarities between the conceptions, phenomena, literary currents that refer to authenticity, trying to motivate their evolution. The subjects to which we will particularly draw attention refer to the relationship between fiction and authenticity; literary authenticity expressed within literary phenomena; and the influence of philosophical conceptions of authenticity on literature, starting from ancient literary texts until the modernist movement in literature.

The relevance of the study of the emergence of new affective states is related to the political and cultural context: global catastrophes, disillusionment with the idea of universal justice and good, doubt about the universality of humanism and Enlightenment ideas. The purpose of the study is to identify new modes of modern emotional culture (awkwardness, post-irony, new sincerity, cringe). Post-irony allows a person, while remaining in a gray moral zone, to express skepticism about the clarity and comprehensibility of the world, and the new sincerity provides tools for reassembling the world and the soul wounded by totalitarian regimes, wars and terrorist attacks in art, which is studied on literary material, therefore the main method of research is hermeneutic. The ideological separation between post-ironic populist politicians and snowflakes adhering to the norms of the new ethics is analyzed. It is assumed that at the individual level, these new modes of emotions and feelings are not only not harmful, but, on the contrary, have a therapeutic effect.

This paper focuses on the director's theater as an important stage in the evolution of the opera genre and at the same time an ambiguous cultural phenomenon. Due to the rapid growth of interest in opera in the last quarter of the twentieth century, the concept of director's opera, which owes its formation and flourishing to the postmodern condition, begins to spread in the West. At present the term director's opera is actively used in Russian art criticism. As a result, it was found that the majority of researchers of musical theater in their works associate this concept with the provocative nature of works and too speculative stage interpretations of operas, as well as apparent liberty in the treatment of classical heritage, leading to the destruction of the opera canon. Simultaneously, with the theoretical reflection of the phenomenon of director' opera, as a result of the major crises of the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries, as well as fatigue from the corrosive, destructing irony of postmodernism, the concept of metamodernism appears. According to the theorists of metamodernism, the new cultural paradigm aims to recode modern culture through art, and music was the first to embrace metamodernism that later on penetrated and conquered various cultural spheres. Defending its social significance and vitality, opera theater, following other art forms, changes its aesthetics, demonstrating trends associated with metamodernism, for instance allows for unexpected collaborations that welcome very different people to shine their otherness. As a result of the study of literature and empirical materials, the author concludes that the outlined intensions, which appeared in the period 2016–2018, can be considered as significant examples of the penetration of metamodern trends in contemporary opera theater. As the examples, the writer considers production of Verdi's opera La Traviata by Wilson and Arthur Honegger’s oratorio Joan of Arc at the Stake by Castellucci.

The paper presents a study of the nature of the experiencing expression in monodramas by E. Grishkovets. This analysis is based on the idea of the human consciousness layering and the hierarchical principle of the organization of "mental spaces" in it, which was considered by F. E. Vasilyuk in relation to experiencing and its expression. The ideas about the work of experiencing as a movement between different life worlds, which are reflected in the monodramas by Grishkovets, are studied in the paper as a feature of the writer's idiostyle. The narrator of the one-man theatrical shows is considered as a literary hero of the "New Sincerity" era, which replaced the period of postmodern literature. The article traces the features of the experiencing expression in the monodramas by Grishkovets, the associative nature of the author's consciousness slipping into other life worlds, and the ways of creating (virtualizing) these life worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the representation of the global phenomenon in the discourses of modernity and metamodernity. In the domestic reception, metamodernism is often represented as post-postmodernism. A significant discrepancy in assessments of a fairly integral phenomenon of modern philosophy of culture, which is metamodernism, can be explained. The methodological guidelines of metamodernism are still in development. Theorists of metamodernism continue their search, the establishment of interaction between postirony, authenticity, new sincerity, depth, historicity, aff ect, selfhood, and superhybridity. In this regard, the analysis of the methodology of metamodernism is possible not only by studying its individual attitudes, but by referring to the foundations of the metamodern discourse. Highlighting the key models of the global in the discourses of modernity and postmodernity allowed us to assess their representation in the metamodern program. The philosophy of modernity is characterized by the idea of the global as the idea of the history taken outside of it (G. Hegel), as the idea that is formed in the process of history (K. Marx). Postmodernism reduces these models to the level of simulacra. The distinction of the local is characteristic of postmodern deconstructivism. Metamodernism in its research practice combines the discourse of the global and the local, off ering options for the return of history to human life.

Artykuł jest próbą przeszczepienia wywodzącej się z literaturoznawstwa anglosaskiego kategorii Nowej Szczerości na grunt refleksji o przemianach kina polskiego ostatnich kilku lat. Rozpoznania zostały przedstawione w świetle trendów współczesnej humanistyki i sztuki, by było możliwe udzielenie odpowiedzi na pytanie, jak wobec nich sytuuje się kino polskie. Na przykładzie filmów Cicha noc (reż. Piotr Domalewski, 2017), Zabij to i wyjedź z tego miasta (reż. Mariusz Wilczyński, 2019) oraz Wszystkie nasze strachy (reż. Łukasz Ronduda, Łukasz Gutt, 2021) autor stara się pokazać rosnące zainteresowanie takimi dyspozycjami afektywnymi bohaterów filmowych jak czułość, podatność na zranienie i troska. Proponowane rozumienie Nowej Szczerości w kontekście kina polskiego odnosi się do filmów, których twórcy podzielają obecne w polskiej debacie publicznej przekonanie o polaryzacji społecznej i kryzysie wspólnoty, a zarazem sugerują inny – reparacyjny, niosący nadzieję – model relacyjności. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ascendency of Donald Trump to President of the United States was marked by the concretisation of the “post-truth” era, an era in which brazen falsehoods not only withstood counterclaims to veracity but seemed to derive their legitimacy from their opposition to readily accepted truths. Epitomised by Kellyanne Conway’s infamous promulgation of “alternative facts,” the defining characteristic of post-truth politics seemed to be that the content of an utterance mattered less than the shamelessness with which it was uttered. It evidenced a divorce between traditional concepts of sincerity and the truth on which such sincerity was traditionally premised, allowing for the post-truth manipulation of shamelessness to make the most forceful claim over the sincere. This trend, I will argue in this essay, has its roots in the abundance of cynicism that beset American postmodernism, which along with post-truth shamelessness also gave rise to the cultural need for a new understanding of sincerity. I intend to trace how Fyodor Dostoevsky’s work influenced one of the foremost proponents of such new sincerity, the novelist David Foster Wallace. Giving particular focus to Dostoevsky’s emphasis on shame in his post-Siberian works, especially in the portrayal of Fyodor Karamazov, I will argue that such emphasis has its correspondence in Emmanuel Levinas’s theorisation of the ethical. I will conclude by suggesting that Levinasian ethics, which represent a departure from the totalising tendency of Enlightenment philosophy, might thereby serve as the basis for a new type of sincerity, one that maintains a sense of the ethical in the face of post-truth shamelessness.

The present paper concerns the discourse of metamodernism problem as a type of the anthropological myth. The anthropological myth is considered as a project for describing reality, which models a systematic consistent idea of a human being, reality, status of reality and develops ethic, aesthetic, axiological views of a subject. The article aims to determine the peculiarities of metamodernism as a fictional discourse of the anthropological myth on the basis of XXI century European novel analysis. The analysis is carried out with the use of the comparative method, contextual description methods, axiomatic method, discourse analysis method etc. The topicality of the undertaken research is determined by the appearance of a new fictional discourse in art at the beginning of the XXI century as well as a new aesthetic paradigm, not described yet. The texts of Western European novels written in the first two decades of the XXI century reveal authors’ consistent refusal of the principles traditionally viewed as post-modernist – novels featuring a simulated nature of reality, novels problematizing the relationships between the signifying and the signified, decentralizing the subject etc. The attempts to describe a particular cultural situation as an alternative to postmodernism have been taken since the 80’s of the XX century; metamodernism acts as one of such projects for describing the modern cultural situation. The paper analyzes the interpretation models referring to XXI century art on the basis Western European novels of XXI century. The author of the paper concludes that metamodernism as a fictional discourse of the new anthropological myth reflects a different idea of the reality. Metamodernism as a cultural project aims to “return” ontology, assume the availability of reality outside the cognizing subject’s consciousness, and surpass the iconic nature of reality. From the epistemological point of view, metamodernism offers cognition of the world and “Ego” via experience of “Another Ego”.

"E Unibus Pluram" de David Foster Wallace es un relato del predominio de la ironía destructiva a fines del siglo XX. Tratando de liberarse del solipsismo provocado por el relativismo posmoderno, Wallace abrazó la sinceridad como la piedra angular del zeitgeist del nuevo milenio. Este artículo ofrece un análisis de dos fuentes de influencia destacadas que podrían considerarse como inspiración para la alternativa de Wallace a la ironía posmoderna: el trascendentalismo estadounidense y las investigaciones filosóficas de Ludwig Wittgenstein. Se hace con la intención de promover la comprensión del significado cultural de la obra del autor para la generación de escritores que siguieron su estela, y demostrar cómo la recuperación de los ideales románticos puede ser la clave para trazar la naturaleza del cambio de paradigma hacia el posmodernismo.

There is a growing discourse on “new sincerity,” and related terms like “quirky” and “metamodernism,” as a movement or sensibility in contemporary cinema developing from the late 1990s onward, exemplified by the work of filmmakers such as Wes Anderson and Charlie Kaufman. However, what this new concept means in the context of cinema has so far remained under-defined and requires further philosophical analysis. This article provides such an analysis by offering a reconceptualization of Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialist-phenomenological notions of good faith and sincerity, which will be connected to developments in film and elaborated in relation to Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach, 2012). I propose, against Sartre's own preference for the problematic term “authenticity,” to understand sincerity as the reflective resumption of good faith's pre-reflective acceptance of human-reality. This conception of sincerity as reflective allows us to accurately understand the combination of self-awareness and affirmation that characterizes new sincerity cinema: its self-awareness does not serve the postmodernist strategy of endless self-ironization; instead, its portrayals affirm the meaningfulness of its filmic reality, while also being aware of film as a medium. An analysis of Frances Ha illustrates how this concept of sincerity might be seen to function both on the level of story world, characters and themes, and on that of narrative structure and audio-visual style, thereby showing how we can meaningfully speak of sincerity in and of film.

David Foster Wallace’s posthumous The Pale King (2011) is often read as an insightful commentary on the wide-ranging economic and ideological changes felt in the post-Fordist workplace throughout the 1980s, as a novel whose deliberation of bureaucratic structures, civic virtue, and concrete labor may defy capitalism’s contemporary emphasis on flexibility. However, the text’s interest in the emotional complications arising from this process warrants more attention. This chapter brings two disconnected strains of Wallace Studies into dialogue by combining an analysis of the novel’s underlying emotional economy with a historicization of Wallace’s programmatic “New Sincerity.” Throughout The Pale King, a palpable authorial persona mandates his readers to labor through the incoherent text. In exchange, he offers a sense of “sincere” compassion and intimacy by addressing his middle-class readership’s anxieties about an increasingly contingent labor market. As this chapter argues, The Pale King speaks to the intersubjective complexities of its readers’ daily lives and offers narrative “quality time” as a form of acknowledgment for their intellectual labor. This perspective firstly helps to explore certain affinities between Wallace’s writing and post-Fordist management techniques and, secondly, contextualize its remarkable commercial success and critical acclaim. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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"New Sincerity", a renewed attention to sincerity, has been connected to metamodernism, a periodizing term that marks a tension between irony and sincerity and an extension of modernism and postmodernism. While both New Sincerity and metamodernism have been discussed in relation to fiction and the other arts, they have not been widely considered in poetry. The article considers the associations of the term New Sincerity in US poet Dorothea Lasky's work, placing her work in the context of metamodernism. With reference to metarepresentation, a cognitive science term that refers to conceptualising what others think, I argue that in Lasky's poems, New Sincerity functions as a persuasive tonal orientation that exhibits sincerity's vexed position as both seemingly naïve and necessary. Lasky's poems make use of the human mind's metarepresentational capacity as they fluctuate between sincerity and irony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that Comedy Central's Nathan For You enacts a sophisticated critique of reality television and offers a different way of capturing 'reality' on the small screen. By exaggerating the format's countless constraints, Nathan for You discovers a way to create real and moving drama from reality television conventions. Using examples taken from across the series, the article argues that the show exemplifies the New Sincerity aesthetic that scholars in numerous other fields have found across contemporary US culture. What Fielder's project ultimately reveals is that the most exaggerated and grotesque forms of reality-television manipulation can paradoxically open up spaces of sincere communication and feeling. The article also explores many of the formal and stylistic devices that Fielder uses across the series, building a case for a reevaluation of the series. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many different models of co ntemporary novel’s description arose from the search for methods and approaches of post-postmodern texts analysis. One of them is the concept of metamodernism, proposed by Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker and based on the culture and philosophy changes at the turn of this century. This article argues that the ideas of metamodernism and its main trends can be successfully used for the study of contemporary literature. The basic trends of metamodernism were determined and observed through the prism of literature studies. They were implemented in the analysis of Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel, Bleeding Edge (2013). Despite Pynchon being usually considered as postmodern writer, the use of metamodern categories for describing his narrative strategies confirms the idea of the novel’s post-postmodern orientation. The article makes an endeavor to use metamodern categories as a tool for post-postmodern text studies, in order to analyze and interpret Bleeding Edge through those categories.

There is a growing discourse on "new sincerity," and related terms like "quirky" and "metamodernism," as a movement or sensibility in contemporary cinema developing from the late 1990s onward, exemplified by the work of filmmakers such as Wes Anderson and Charlie Kaufman. However, what this new concept means in the context of cinema has so far remained under-defined and requires further philosophical analysis. This article provides such an analysis by offering a reconceptualization of Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialist-phenomenological notions of good faith and sincerity, which will be connected to developments in film and elaborated in relation to Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach, 2012). I propose, against Sartre's own preference for the problematic term "authenticity," to understand sincerity as the reflective resumption of good faith's pre-reflective acceptance of human-reality. This conception of sincerity as reflective allows us to accurately understand the combination of self-awareness and affirmation that characterizes new sincerity cinema: its self-awareness does not serve the postmodernist strategy of endless self-ironization; instead, its portrayals affirm the meaningfulness of its filmic reality, while also being aware of film as a medium. An analysis of Frances Ha illustrates how this concept of sincerity might be seen to function both on the level of story world, characters and themes, and on that of narrative structure and audio-visual style, thereby showing how we can meaningfully speak of sincerity in and of film. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article situates the Pixar computer animation Coco (dir. Lee Unkrich and Adrian Molina, 2017) within a recent selection of afterlife fictions and questions why such narratives might appeal to our contemporary moment. The author's response is structured around the idea of utopia. In Coco, he identifies several conceptions of utopic space and ideals. The afterlife fiction places characters and viewers in a reflexive location which affords them the opportunity to examine their lives as lived (rather than in death). Transplanting Richard Dyer's work on classic Hollywood musicals as entertainment utopia to a contemporary animated musical, the article proposes that such a film can be seen as adhering to a kind of 'new cinematic sincerity'. Coco 's particular depiction of The Day of the Dead fiesta and the Land of the Dead has its roots in the Mexican writer Octavio Paz's poetic and romantic treatise The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950). A comparison between these two texts suggests that willing encounters with death can be connected to an openness to transitional states of being. Through close readings of key musical sequences in Coco, the author demonstrates how the properties of the musical are combined with animation aesthetics (baby schemata, virtual camera) to lead viewers into their own utopian space of heightened emotions and transition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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After the success of postmodern superhero comics that deconstructed heroism in post-Vietnam, post-Watergate USA, mid-1990s comics experienced a resurgence in unabashedly heroic narratives. This coincided with David Foster Wallace’s call for post-irony and the emergence of New Sincerity, a post-postmodern trend that aims to break with cynicism. I will argue that these superhero comics are inherently nostalgic, drawing on tropes, storylines, and characters from the Silver Age comics of the 1950s and 60s. Discussing this dispute between postmodern cynicism and New Sincerity, a lens through which the current political and cultural landscape can be analyzed and dissected, will shed light on the origin and nature of two opposing narrative trends that have been increasingly shaping American culture, society, and politics.

This article explores Tao Lin's Taipei as a quintessential example of the twenty-first century 'internet novel.' Engaging with the novel's reputation both as a 'modernist masterpiece' (Lytal 2013) and one that features seemingly postmodern 'self-parody' (Garner 2013), this reading of Taipei introduces the term 'cyber-consciousness' in order to suggest that this tension between modern sincerity and postmodern parody is productively interrogated by digitality in both character consciousness and narrative form. This composting of modern, postmodern and digital elements produces an avenue through which we might come to understand the post-postmodern internet novel.

Many different models of co ntemporary novel's description arose from the search for methods and approaches of post-postmodern texts analysis. One of them is the concept of metamodernism, proposed by Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker and based on the culture and philosophy changes at the turn of this century. This article argues that the ideas of metamodernism and its main trends can be successfully used for the study of contemporary literature. The basic trends of metamodernism were determined and observed through the prism of literature studies. They were implemented in the analysis of Thomas Pynchon's latest novel, Bleeding Edge (2013). Despite Pynchon being usually considered as postmodern writer, the use of metamodern categories for describing his narrative strategies confirms the idea of the novel's post-postmodern orientation. The article makes an endeavor to use metamodern categories as a tool for post-postmodern text studies, in order to analyze and interpret Bleeding Edge through those categories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of the New Sincerity in contemporary American fiction has largely been read on terms provided by a handful of early proponents. This article contends that more complex formulations of the notion are necessary if it is to remain useful as a descriptor for important qualities of recent texts. Among issues in need of greater attention are the implications of the New Sincerity for historical awareness, a topic I pursue via consideration of William T. Vollmann's grappling with literary history. I argue that Vollmann's works offer more than the pastiche that allegedly defined historical consciousness in postmodernist fiction. His intertextual engagements with Edgar Allan Poe are especially valuable for modelling some of the ways recent fictions bypass postmodernist ahistoricism in favour of connections to a usable past, and, especially, a usable literary tradition. Readings of Vollmann's 'The Grave of Lost Stories' (in several editions) and 'The Cemetery of the World' show how he employs research in the textual archive as a figuration of relations to the past that can serve the ends of renewal and recovery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Post-9/11 literature has been noted as lacking in critical force because it fails to envision America mediated by global history and international politics. The post-9/11 narratives of Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace, however, attempt to move away from American insularity and attain worldliness, specifically by abandoning the influence of postmodernism, which seemed to reinforce the provincial, self-involved nature of American culture by fostering the ideas of indeterminacy, irony, and depthless parody. Instead, by affirming the ethos of New Sincerity and a sensibility that this essay calls new worldliness, DeLillo and Wallace promote the cultivation of political acuity with which one can navigate the intertwined worlds of the local and the national, the private and the public, and the domestic and the international. They foster the values of social participation, political openness, and linguistic clarity, through which post-9/11 Americans become not only sincere but also worldly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Babylon Bee, a Christian parody and satire website launched in March 2016, has quickly gained attention and a large following amongst Evangelical Christians and communities online. This paper argues that the site promotes a specific strain of Evangelicalism that may be understood through the concept of countersymbols developed by Jonathan J. Edwards. Using Edwards's notions of countersymbols as an organizing concept to analyze the use of parodic and satirical rhetoric, this article argues that The Babylon Bee portrays a vision of the church in contemporary society that may be described as exemplifying the countersymbol of "Sincerity." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Raoul Eshelman´s review of the book Sincerity after Communism. A Cultural History by Ellen Rutten

This essay examines how and why psychoanalysis becomes a flashpoint in current debates about sincerity and “post-ironic” reading practices. It argues that the authors’ disagreement about Freud’s legacy—Kunkel sees the analytic session as a liberal contract, while Julavits sees it as a scene of power—signals conflicting sensibilities about the role of suspicion in intellectual life. These conflicting sensibilities have divided n + 1 and The Believer (founded by Kunkel and Julavits, respectively) since their inauguration, and they represent a larger feud among progressive intellectuals about how we should read and relate to others. Most agree that irony is outmoded, but what does a post-ironic ethos looks like? What does it mean to be serious? What is the best way to take something (or someone) seriously? This essay advances Kunkel’s notion that suspicion is not necessarily opposed to sincerity, and it likewise argues that sincerity is methodological, rather than characterological. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history of sincerity includes prominent arguments about the decline (even death) of sincerity. In this article I argue that sincerity has not declined or died in the post-modern and contemporary age. Rather this period has revivified Classical Christian, Medieval, Enlightenment and Romantic modes of self-representation that focus on representational fidelity to your own feelings, experiences, and beliefs. In turn I suggest these foci have long been understood to be morally significant within Christian theological anthropologies and frameworks going back to figures like Augustine, Scotus, and Luther. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to shed light on the ways in which contemporary Romanian poetry has underwent a change in the last decade, signaling not only a mutation in the literary field, but also a shift in social values. The main characteristics of ‚Generation 2000’ are being put into question by the emergence of a new promotion of poets. Within this paper, the two different poetic sensibilities are mirrored to show the mechanism of evolution within the Romanian literary canon and to exactly pinpoint its motives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is poetry compatible with autobiography? Does the notion of pure poetry still make sense? And what is poetry? These are some of the questions revisited in this article, which is meant to introduce the reader to the work of midwestern American poet Chuck Miller (b. 1939). Paul Valéry's theoretical writings on poetry are used as a benchmark to locate Miller's verse on the spectrum of the genre and tease out Miller's own implicit ars poetica through poems, many of which happen to bear some relation, central or anecdotal, to the Czech Republic. Unlikely as the assemblage of its various components may appear at first glance (a Mallarmé-inspired defender of pure poetry vs. a proto-exponent of "New Sincerity"), the article gradually makes plain its raison d'être as the basis for comparison between the two poets is shown to be wider than expected, including, for example, a shared sense of the importance of the body in poetry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]