The Transformation of New Sincerity Aesthetics in Zadie Smith’s Grand Union

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper proposes that a transformation of the New Sincerity aesthetics has taken place in Zadie Smith’s short fiction. This shift is explored through an analysis of some of the short stories in Smith’s most recent collection, Grand Union, opposite David Foster Wallace’s “Octet”, one of the foundational fictions of the literary New Sincerity. Their respective approaches to authenticity considered, Smith is argued to have partially departed from the other-directed concern with the reader that had shaped Wallace’s outlook on sincerity, and thus to stand at a productive intersection between postmodernist form, the anticipatory disposition of New Sincerity aesthetes, and the unquestioned, unironic embrace of single-entendre values that Wallace prophesied for the twenty-first century.