New piece by Adam Kelly over at Post45, Dialectic of Sincerity: Lionel Trilling and David Foster Wallace:
[...]
Sincerity became for Wallace, as it had been for Trilling, one name for a new, or renewed, literary and cultural practice. And while Wallace never mentions Trilling's name in his published work, his awareness of Sincerity and Authenticity is evidenced by a handwritten note he made in a book from his personal library held at the Harry Ransom Center. Moreover, Wallace's pretentions to broad social pronouncement and his liking for cultural and conceptual history—not to mention his liberal imagination, to which I will return—all connect him closely to the figure of Trilling; we might even say that the most famous thing Wallace ever said in an interview—his declaration, made to McCaffery, that "Fiction's about what it is to be a fucking human being"—is a claim made over and over again (minus the swearword) in the humanist literary criticism Trilling wrote.22 But Wallace's overt preoccupation with irony alongside sincerity differentiates him from his forebear and marks his work as a further turn in the dialectic of sincerity. If for Trilling, in other words, the key concept that opposed sincerity was authenticity, for Wallace it was irony. This shift alters the theoretical foundations and cultural connotations of sincerity, and it is also what makes the novel—with its dialogic form and more complex relationship to ironic statement—the place where Wallace's highly developed thinking on sincerity could find its most telling manifestation.[...]
Great stuff! Continue reading Dialectic of Sincerity: Lionel Trilling and David Foster Wallace.
Also by Adam Kelly, David Foster Wallace: the Death of the Author and the Birth of a Discipline.
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