IJ study archive

David Foster Wallace and New Sincerity Aesthetics: A Reply to Edward Jackson and Joel Nicholson-Roberts

source

TL;DR

Kelly's direct published response (Orbit 5.2, 2017) to the "White Guys" article. He refutes what he calls misrepresentations of his 2010 New Sincerity essay and uses the occasion to restate his theory in its mature form — notably reframing its historical context from "postmodernism" to "neoliberalism." Read together with White Guys, this is the clearest single snapshot of the central debate in second-wave Wallace studies.

Key claims

  • Situates the attack within a broader "Wallace backlash": journalistic criticism since ~2011, "Wallace Industry" complaints after The End of the Tour (2015), and feminist commentary connecting the perceived maleness of Wallace's writing to his readership.
  • Jackson and Nicholson-Roberts conflate Kelly's account of New Sincerity with Wallace's own stated views ("postmodern affectlessness" appears nowhere in Kelly's work); they critique Wallace's E Unibus Pluram-era rhetoric as if it were Kelly's theory.
  • New Sincerity, properly stated, is not "sincerity over irony": it names a generational aesthetic response to the challenge posed to expressive subjectivity by (a) Derridean theory of "general writing" and (b) the centrality of advertising in American culture.
  • Kelly now argues "neoliberalism," not "postmodernism," is the term that best historicizes Wallace's generation (anticipating his book project American Fiction at the Millennium: Neoliberalism and the New Sincerity).
  • He grants that race and gender in Wallace are serious questions but finds approaches via historical context, style/genre, and archival research more persuasive than the authors' use of da Silva's race theory.

Themes

Irony vs. sincerity; the entertainment/advertising culture IJ dramatizes; methodology of Wallace studies; neoliberalism as the novel's economic backdrop (Subsidized Time, O.N.A.N.).

Cross-references

Notable passages

"Rather than 'postmodernism'... the term that I now think best encompasses all of these contexts is 'neoliberalism'."

"New Sincerity primarily names an aesthetic response by a generation of novelists to the challenge to older forms of expressive subjectivity that coalesced in the period during which they began writing."