One More Time with Feeling: Repetition, Contingency, and Sincerity in Ben Lerner’s 10:04

Abstract

ABSTRACTAs the story goes, New Sincerity emerged as a response to the decline of postmodern theory and the rise of neoliberalism, with novelists and critics presenting literature’s capacity to foster affective attachments to texts and readers as a challenge to neoliberalism’s dehumanizing logic. In presenting the temporal dimension of New Sincerity as formally similar to the logic of economic value that it seeks to disavow, Ben Lerner’s 2014 metafictional memoir-cum-novel, 10:04, helps challenge this narrative. I argue that 10:04’s aesthetic of repetition alerts us to how collectively experienced forms—from neoliberalism to literary address—produce affective and material effects that are highly contingent on the reader’s position in relation to them. To this end, 10:04 also makes visible the unpaid forms of labor that subtend creative production.