Beyond Postmodernism: David Foster Wallace and the Creation of New Sincerity
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Date
2025-05
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Vanderbilt University
Abstract
The common interpretation of David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest sees the text as a work of postmodernism, falling in line with the literary tradition of postwar American authors who emphasized the use of irreverence, irony and cynicism in their novels. While Infinite Jest is indeed in conversation with the postmodern movement, I believe that this reading of the novel is incomplete because it fails to account for the rest of David Foster Wallace’s canon. When understanding Infinite Jest as one part in Wallace’s larger body of works, it becomes clear that the novel is not postmodern, and is instead a deconstruction of postmodern tropes that begins to establish the formal and thematic framework for a new movement called new sincerity. New sincerity is an ongoing movement that began to develop in the early 2000’s. Its aim is to answer the question of whether or not sincere art – art that demonstrates honesty from the creator to the consumer about intention and motivation – can exist in a commodified media landscape. In my project, I examine the use of metafictional characters and texts in Infinite Jest and David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel, The Pale King, to illustrate the ways in which his novels mark the beginning of the new sincere movement instead of the end of the postmodern movement.
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English Department Honors Thesis.