I just finished reading an essay by David Foster Wallace entitled "E UNIBUS PLURAM: television and U.S. Fiction". Because I've been thinking of re-immersing myself in my erstwhile pastime of writing, I found myself paying special attention. The essay's ultimate concern, inartfully paraphrased, is "what do we do in an artistic and literary world where irony and skepticism (i.e. postmodernism) has moved out of the fringe and into the mainstream and so permeated the culture that it is no longer effective except as an instrument of stasis?"
Postmodernism was itself the inevitable end to the rebellion that blossomed in modernism and was a proper destruction of old reactionary values. But when rebellion has reached its end, as DFW effectively argues has happened, what next?
DFW argues that a new-sincerity is the answer. He also alludes to this argument in other essays.
The question that remains for me is: how do you distinguish new sincerity from old sincerity; what makes it "new"? The answer that immediately comes to mind is that the writer, or whomever, must look at the ironic and the sincere with the same sincerity. The hipster crowd at the self-aware dive bar listening to the latest ironic cover song played by a bunch of starved-looking musicians must be treated with the same sincerity and interest as some Folks at a lunch counter that is across the street from the tractor dealership and next door to the bank named after the town it's in.
But that's only my immediate answer and if I could reliably answer intellectually-dense questions so quickly, I wouldn't have to practice law.
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