![]() ![]() ![]() His work has been dubbed ‘newly sincere’ before now (Williams, 2015) and as new interpretive labels emerge to define this societal shift that works like Infinite Jest perhaps played a role in helping instigate, it is inevitable that Wallace will be cited as a chief contributor. The idea that there exists a more applicable interpretative movement than postmodernism to categorise his work and that of his contemporaries is not a new one. There has always been a problem with accurately pigeon holing Wallace. Upon release, The Atlantic (1996) described the novel as “a multi-layered postmodern saga of damnation and salvation”. This blend of irony and cynicism and Vermeulen’s “modern enthusiasm” are on display clearly in Wallace’s seminal novel Infinite Jest (1996). Vermeulen’s continues to state that postmodern tropes are not simply rejected and left behind instead this artistic shift hinges on what he terms “an oscillation of postmodern irony and modern enthusiasm”. This sensibility is something both Wallace’s literary rebels and Saltz’s “unafraid and unashamed” young artists seem to relate to. When describing his contemporary answer to this question, Vermeulen (2010) wrote: “At the time of writing, metamodernism appears to find its clearest expression in an emergent neoromantic sensibility”. So if the postmodern literary moment has passed, what’s next? “At once knowingly self-conscious about art, unafraid, and unashamed, these young artists not only see the distinction between earnestness and detachment as artificial they grasp that they can be ironic and sincere at the same time, and they are making art from this compound-complex state of mind”. Jerry Saltz gave one in The New Yorker (2010): Today we see examples of this in art, literature, film and print media. Wallace prophesised in E Unibus Pluram that the country’s next literary rebels might well emerge treating “plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. Kelly (2016) cites the “Reaganomics and the neoconservative ‘end of history’ consensus” of the 80’s as responsible for Wallace’s generation of authors striving to achieve something more meaningful in their work. In the essay Wallace describes anxieties about American art and the emotional stasis that an oversaturation of irony and cynicism has generated. The novelist David Foster Wallace addressed the potential end of postmodernity in his essay E Unibus Pluram (1993). Hutcheon proceeds to encourage readers to “find it – and name it for the twenty-first century”. It follows logically that something must take its place. ![]() Social and literary theorist Linda Hutcheon wrote in the epilogue to The Politics of Postmodernity: “The postmodern moment has passed, even if its discursive strategies and its ideological critique continue to live on”. In wake of this, Lyotard implies the individual is left to fill the gap with his/her subjective idea of understanding. ![]() Lyotard identified the years following World War II as demonstrating a rejection of totality and the all-encompassing accounts of human experience that so neatly shaped our understanding of history. In his seminal work, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Jean Francois Lyotard (1979) defined postmodernity as a period of ‘incredulity toward meta-narratives’. ![]()
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