Dana Spiotta and the Novel after Authenticity

Abstract

New Sincerity literature is thought to succeed postmodern fiction with formally conventional narratives centered on dilemmas of alienation and communication and the difficulty of conveying one's inner life to others amid late or neoliberal capitalism. A major author of the New Sincerity, Dana Spiotta has examined such dilemmas in her four novels. This article proposes that her most recent, Innocents and Others (2016), signals an abrupt end to the New Sincerity and effectively retheorizes the periodization of recent US fiction. Tracing the unexpected deployment of postmodern epistemologies and aesthetics by the novel's central character, the article contends that Spiotta marks the New Sincerity as having reached an ironically postmodern state of exhaustion. In doing so, Spiotta discloses an atypical theory of periodization that rejects the antipathies that characterize recent literary history, emphasizing instead fiction's own involvement with the discourses that make legible literary-historical tensions.