New Sincerity

Photo credits: Cristiano Remo

New Sincerity

The literary and philosophical project of David Foster Wallace — an attempt to write fiction that took itself emotionally seriously after decades in which Literary Postmodernism had made irony the dominant mode of sophisticated writing.

The Problem DFW Identified

In the essay E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction (1993), DFW diagnosed the central problem of American fiction in his time: television had colonized irony. Irony — originally a vanguard weapon against mass culture — had been absorbed by mass culture and repurposed to sell products. Postmodern fiction, by continuing to use irony as its dominant mode, was now imitating television rather than resisting it.

The result: a literature in which nothing could be said seriously without the risk of being seen as kitsch or naïveté. Irony became a shield. It protected against vulnerability, but at the same time made genuine connection impossible — which requires precisely that vulnerability.

“Irony and cynicism were just what’s true, to a whole generation of us who grew up in the seventies… But their irony is the irony of slaves.”

The Proposal

The New Sincerity is not the abolition of irony. It is the refusal to use irony as an end in itself. DFW wanted writers who would use irony but not remain in it — who would pass through irony to arrive at something genuine on the other side.

The literary model was Dostoevsky: a writer unafraid of seeming sentimental, who lets characters speak true things directly, without the protective quotation marks of irony. DFW wrote a key essay — Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky — on what nineteenth-century Russian novels can teach twentieth-century American fiction.

The concrete proposal: fiction that genuinely tries to make the reader feel less alone. Not through formal tricks, but through honesty about the difficulty of being alive.

Connection to Depression

There is a direct connection between the New Sincerity project and DFW’s depression. “The Bad Thing” isolates precisely because it cannot be said — the depressed person feels in a different kind of existence, incommunicable. Literature as an attempt to communicate the incommunicable is, in this sense, a direct response to the experience of depression.

Paradox: DFW theorized literature as a cure for isolation while living with an isolation that literature could not heal.

Philosophical Connections

• Kierkegaard — the move from the aesthetic stadium (ironic distance, enjoyment without commitment) to the ethical stadium (choice, responsibility, genuine connection) is the philosophical structure underlying DFW’s project.
• Wittgenstein — the limits of language as a real problem, not an excuse for silence; the attempt to say what resists saying.
• William James — pragmatism as a refusal of cynicism; the “will to believe” as a philosophical and moral act.

Heirs and Context

The term “New Sincerity” has broader uses in cultural theory (music, visual arts, the internet), but in literature it is inseparable from DFW. Writers frequently associated with his influence include Jonathan Franzen, Dave Eggers, Zadie Smith, and George Saunders. The debate over whether “new sincerity” has survived social-media culture — where irony and sincerity have become indistinguishable — remains open.

See also:

• Critical lines in David Foster Wallace’s literature
• The Addiction as a Civilizational Metaphor in Infinite Jest