White Guys: Questioning Infinite Jest's New Sincerity

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TL;DR

Peer-reviewed article (Orbit 5.1, 2017, DFW Special Issue) that attacks the dominant "New Sincerity" reading of Infinite Jest, especially Adam Kelly's influential version of it. Argues that the novel's celebrated turn from irony to sincerity is implicitly coded white and male, and that the AA scenes achieve their affective payoff at the expense of black and female characters. The most prominent "Wallace backlash" piece in the academic literature; provoked a direct published reply from Kelly (see kelly-new-sincerity-reply).

Key claims

Adam Kelly's New Sincerity theory misreads Derrida: it tames "iterability" and "undecidability" so they apply only to privileged "literary" texts (vs. advertising and popular culture), making the theory culturally elitist.
Kelly's framework quietly reinstates a sovereign, calculating decision-maker behind sincere utterances — and that subject position in Infinite Jest is reserved for white men.
Drawing on Denise Ferreira da Silva's Toward a Global Idea of Race: the novel's white male characters get to be "transcendent" self-determining subjects whose crisis (anhedonia, lovelessness) is treated as universal, while black and female characters are positioned as merely "affectable" bodies whose suffering is local and instrumental.
Close readings of the celebrated AA recovery material show recovery demanding that marginal subjects assimilate to white male prescriptions in order to "recover"; AA disciplines addicts (and readers) into accepting a supposedly universal lovelessness that is actually a white male anxiety.
Conclusion: "Infinite Jest's New Sincerity actually restores a white male liberal humanist subject as the locus for representative experience" — sincerity here "cancels critique."

Themes

Irony vs. sincerity; addiction and AA; race and gender in the novel; communication; the politics of who gets interiority in IJ.

Cross-references

Direct rebuttal: kelly-new-sincerity-reply.
AA and recovery scenes (Gately, "Blind Faith") and an unnamed CA speaker whose testimony is mediated through Joelle are the central evidence here.
Contrast with the pro-sincerity line in entertainment-addiction-tartu and the "x over irony" paradigm diagnosed in irony-narcissism-affect-woodend.

Notable passages

"By installing the impossibility of (re)attaining a transcendent subjectivity... as the universal ground of a post-liberal humanist subject, Infinite Jest's New Sincerity actually restores a white male liberal humanist subject as the locus for representative experience."

"...towards an ethics that absents power, a sincerity that cancels critique, and a human that remains a white guy." (closing line)