Postmodern Irony Research Articles

POETICS OF NEW SINCERITY LITERATURE VS POSTMODERN AESTHETICS: KAZUO ICHIGURO’S NOVEL “NEVER LET ME GO”

The purpose of the study is to determine the peculiarities of the poetics of the literature of new sincerity as polemically sharpened against postmodern irony, scepticism and cynicism and to identify the poetics of new sincerity in K. Ishiguro’s novel “Never Let Me Go”. To achieve this goal, the author uses cultural-historical, cultural-philosophical, hermeneutical research methods. The paper traces the formation of the concept of ‘sincerity’, which has been transformed over many centuries, acquiring new meanings against the background of different eras. The concept of ‘sincerity’ is considered in the context of cultural philosophy and literary criticism. Much attention is paid to the opposition between the new sincerity and postmodern irony, which is analysed not only as an artistic manifestation but also as a way of thinking. The phenomenon of new sincerity is considered in the work as a reaction to the socio-cultural shifts that led to the end of the postmodern era. The research attempts to identify the differentiating features of the poetics of the works that make up the layer of the literature of new sincerity. Among them are the peculiarity of the issues, which consists in the aggravation of problems of a more intimate, personal nature, the originality of the hero, who is a reflective personality who pays great attention to his inner world, is concerned with the issue of self- identification; characteristic narrative style, which is characterised by the presence of a diegetic narrator and a confessional character; deep psychologism and empathy; appeal to universal values; self-irony as an indicator of the writer’s individual style or the complete absence of irony. Kazuo Ishiguro’s dystopian novel is studied from the perspective of aesthetics and poetics of new sincerity. The study has made it possible to draw conclusions about the characteristic features of the work inherent in the literature of new sincerity. Thus, the narrative in the work is conducted on behalf of a diegetic narrator who is preoccupied with issues of self-identification and cognition of his inner world. The narrative style invites the reader to an active dialogue and promotes empathy, including for working through their own psychological problems. The fragmentary affective narrative style is supported by the minimal plot intensity, which allows for a deep psychological impact. The images of the novel’s characters are fully consistent with the paradigm characteristic of the literature of new sincerity. The author traces the presence of motifs of home, road, understatement, loss, death, and conscious sacrifice, which are used to implement the humanistic idea of the work, and their into the opposite. The author draws conclusions about the opposition to the new sincerity of postmodernism at all levels of a work of art. Thus, the novel lacks the dominant function of play; on the contrary, the text of the novel is extremely simple, artistic means are minimised, and the narrative style is as close as possible to a conversational diary confession. One of the aims is to find ethical absolutes that could be relied upon in a globalised world where all borders have been erased. The novel’s eclectic and fragmentary images of postmodernism give way to complex, multifaceted, and carefully drawn ones. The behaviour and various reactions of the characters are psychologically motivated. The novel shows a refusal to depersonalise the action due to the dominant function of the diegetic narrator and a complete rejection of postmodern irony.

CULTURAL AND HISTORICAL BOUNDARIES OF METAMODERNISM

The author analyzes the conceptual dichotomy of the concepts of postmodernity-metamodernity, postmodernism-metamodernism, postmodernity-metamodernity. The cultural and historical boundaries of metamodernism are defined, which is not only a successor to postmodernism, but also a reaction to it, including the reconfiguration of sensuality associated with the currents of modernity. The author reveals the content of metamodernism’s ideas about the return of hope and sincerity after decades of dominance of postmodern irony and cynicism.

Reconstructing the Partition Hi(story): Between Sincerity and Satire in Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand (Ret Samadhi)

This research paper positions Geetanjali Shree’s International Booker Prize winner Hindi-language novel Ret Samadhi (2018), translated into English Tomb of Sand (2022) by Daisy Rockwell, as a metamodern text and tries to pitch the idea that this novel redraws partition boundaries illustrated in the Indian partition literature. This novel develops postmodern irony and metafiction into David Foster Wallace’s brainchild Post-Irony and Lee Konstantinou’s idea of Credulous Metafiction to establish new sincerity in Indian partition literature. An octogenarian grandmother, Ma or Amma, wishes to visit Pakistan and eventually not only succeeds in visiting her ancestral home in Lahore but also offers a new understanding of India’s partition and boundaries between the two nations. The novel views India’s partition tragedy from a metamodern perspective of oscillation between a modern enthusiasm and postmodern irony and portrays the partition as painful as it was in past or as alleviative as it can become at present. Selfreflexive irony in the novel constantly proposes new meanings of partition trauma highlighted in Ma’s vagaries with a unique narrative strategy agglutinating the stories of modern urban life, history, folklore, environment, and womanhood with the main story. How a contemporary story on India’s partition oscillates [Vermeulen and Van Den Akkar] between modern and postmodern interpretations of displacement seeking candour and authenticity with the help of its self-referential metafiction dubbed as ‘Credulous Metafiction’ by Lee Konstantinou to locate NewSincerity [Adam Kelly] in partition literature is the major point discussed in this paper.

Language of the Future as an Object of Satire in D. Eggers’s Dystopic Dilogy

Personal worldview can be subjected to linguistic modeling even if the person in question is a fictional character. This research featured the vocabulary invented by the contemporary American writer Dave Eggers for his dystopic dilogy, as well as the role of this fictional language in creating satirical mode. The study involved such methods of cognitive linguistics as component, transformational, and stylistic analyses, analytical description, and semantic fields. The article opens with a review of domestic and foreign publications on the connection between language, social processes, and thinking. The Circle (2013) and The Every (2021) were analyzed for satirical and stylistic devices. The dilogy turned out to be a new type of satire, which combines the postmodern irony and deconstruction with the metamodern openness and optimism. The vocabulary of the future as seen by the author was analyzed for its functions in creating the worldview. Its key features include: neologisms and occasionalisms coined in line with actual word-formation models; contrasting high and low-style vocabulary; euphemisms and modified set phrases. D. Eggers also satirized some real linguistic trends, which, in his opinion, deform the language and affect people’s mind and behavior.

Эссе “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” Д. Ф. Уоллеса как ключ к пониманию американской культуры и общества: анализ основных тем в контексте романов “Infinite Jest” (1996) и “The Pale King” (2011)

The article analyzes the main ideas of the essay E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction (1993) written by the American writer David Foster Wallace (1962–2008). According to scholars and researchers studying the writer’s oeuvre, this essay reflects his worldview and serves as the basis of most of his literary works. In E Unibus Pluram, D. F. Wallace considered the following issues as characterizing modern American culture and society: addictions of American people caused by their loneliness and dissatisfaction with life; consumerism as an unproductive activity; individualism as the embodiment of selfishness and unwillingness to pursue communal well-being; the contradictory nature of freedom and the illusion of choice. In addition, D. F. Wallace examined cynicism and irony of postmodernism cultivated by commercial art that, in turn, distort American writers’ perception of reality: they are basing their works on the fiction presented by television, which they perceive as realistic material. The researchers believe that the analyzed essay largely marked the transition from American postmodernism to metamodernism (the concepts such as ‘New Sincerity’ ‘postirony’, etc. are also used as related or synonymous) in the 20th–21st centuries; Wallace’s statement about the exhaustion of postmodern irony and his call for sincerity are considered to lie at the heart of reflections on the place of the writer in the modern literary context. The issues stated above are discussed in the article in the context of the D. F. Wallace’s magnum opus Infinite Jest (1996) and his unfinished novel The Pale King (2011): it is concluded that they are central to understanding these novels and reveal meanings and ideas conveyed in the texts. This is the novelty of this article: there have been numerous research papers about the personality and works of the author published abroad; however, in Russian literary criticism, these aspects are insufficiently studied or have not been considered yet.

Characteristics of postmodern irony in Robert Coover’s novel “Public burning”

Characteristics of postmodern irony in Robert Coover’s novel “Public burning”

Popular historical films as collective memory-work in Eastern Europe: from Polish KATYN to Romanian AFERIM! and Hungarian BET ON REVENGE

Abstract Historical film – a film genre supported in the Cold War era – has re-emerged in the 21st century in Eastern European cinemas, its success signalled by popularity, dedicated state financing funds or political support. This article frames the phenomenon within the Assmannian model of three communicative generations, suggested to be interlinked on the level of both the creative staff and the audience of Eastern European historical films. Based on box-office data of the Lumiere Database of the European Audiovisual Observatory, and research referring to further elements of canonization, it is argued that titles such as Polish Katyn (2007), Romanian Aferim! (2015) or Hungarian Bet on Revenge (2016) – the first majority production historical films to achieve significant audience, and, consequently, critical success in their domestic markets in the 21st century – signal a successful collective memory-work process. While in the major Polish market this may be inscribed within the three communicative generations of the victims, the forgetters and the mourners doing memory-work – possibly processing collective traumatization too –, the two small national examples fall outside the validity of the Assmannian model. In order to somewhat refine this apparent opposition between 21st century Eastern European major and small national collective memory-work through historical films, further examples from the Polish, Hungarian and Romanian top lists are examined. Poetic-medial features – the actualization of “trauma narratives” (Alexander 2012) or of postmodern irony, the employment of cinematic and/or televisual visuality – seem to facilitate collective memory-work differently for major and small national domestic audiences, activating or not their belonging to the three communicative generations with respect to the historical events represented in the films.

Transformations of the travelogue genre in the essays by A. Ulanov

The purpose of the article is to outline the approaches to the comprehension of the travelogue genre dynamics by exploring the modification ways of some conventional features in the latest samples of the genre. So, the lack of analytical procedures in this field of literary theory is filled. Structural-analytical, hermeneutical methods, and the method of motivic analysis were used. A. Ulanovs essays as an empirical material represent a trend towards aesthetic and intellectual search in the modern literature. The number and dispersion of loci described in the essays, as well as the similarity of style and theme, create the effect of a wide coverage of the space. The realias that the traveller sees and describes in other cities, countries and continents is not perceived as the alien, since the author has prior knowledge about it and ponders deeply and non-trivially on what he sees, presenting it in original forms. Reflection generated by the authors experience of exploring space does not dominate over a close look at the world and the Other. The subjectivity of multifaceted observations and reasoning is built up due to particular aesthetic fullness. An important role in this regard is played by the images of stone and water, which lead to the theme of time and memory, perceived as a touch to the past. The rejection of the de-individualized practice of visiting attractions and the tourist/traveller dichotomy are clearly visible. There is a postmodern irony towards historical reconstruction, the possibility of touching the past is developed through subjective peering and reflection.

Музыка кинематографа «новой искренности»

The article presents the basic principles and features of the cinema of the “new sincerity”, which asserted itself in the 1980s and reflected an important trend of modern artistic and philosophical-aesthetic thought in the form of a departure from postmodern irony. At the same time, an important “methodological” approach for a creator of a work of art in this direction is to find a balance between sincerity and irony. A significant example of finding such a balance is the work of Finnish film producer Aki Kaurismäki. The article presents a sound analysis of the three of the most famous films that are the most representative of the producer’s style, classified by critics as the so-called “proletarian trilogy” — Shadows in Paradise (1986), Ariel (1988) and The Girl from the Match Factory (1990). In these films, Kaurismäki’s musical “lexicon” is, likewise, crystallized, presenting an original, diverse and, at the same time, surprisingly organic set of “identifying signs” of the musical atmosphere of his movies. An analysis of the features of the functioning role of the music in Aki Kaurismäki’s films (both as presented in the text and as remaining outside it) makes it possible for us to arrive at the following conclusions: the musical accompaniment of an episode of a film creates an opportunity for an indirect, often subtly ironic, but, nonetheless, sincere author’s statement, without a straightforward voicing of the meaning of the intra-frame action; a conscious personal choice of the musical material (both the musical quotations and the original compositions), combined with the visuals, contributes to the creation of polysemantic (intertextual) audiovisual images; the relationship of the film’s music with the producer’s off-screen world presents one of the important principles and an effective way of manifesting “new sincerity” in cinema, simultaneously contributing to the creation of unique artistic screen images; the use of a personal “musical lexicon” contributes to the development of the author’s artistic style in filmmaking, one manifestation of which is bringing in musical meta-quotations that stylistically unify the producer’s various films.

Post-Postmodernism, the “Affective Turn”, and Inauthenticity

This article considers Rachel Greenwald Smith’s concept of the “Affective Turn” in contemporary fiction by looking at a constellation of novels published near the turn of the twenty-first century: David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996), Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (2001), Percival Everett’s Erasure (2001), and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000). As Rachel Greenwald Smith claims, this “Turn” offers a “corrective or counter to postmodernist suspicion towards subjective emotion” and has foundations of sincerity and authenticity, which align it with the premise of post-postmodernism. These novels, I argue, collectively engage with the affective turn’s inherent post-postmodern potential, as their authors respond to, challenge, and react against postmodern irony and the license of inauthenticity that comes with this.

KRITIKA POSTMODERNISTIČKE IRONIJE U DOKUMENTARNOJ PROZI DEJVIDA FOSTERA VOLASA

His criticism and efforts to overcome the negative consequences of postmodern irony – mostly as a worldview that has had a profound impact on contemporary American society and literature – are central to understanding David Foster Wallace’s literary work. Unlike his highly influential fiction (novels and short stories), his nonfiction (essays and articles) still remains understudied, in spite of the volume and importance of his essays in the Ameri- can culture and beyond. The paper analyses Wallace’s criticism of postmodern irony in his nonfiction by considering three selected essays, with the aim of examining the possibility that Wallace’s nonfiction succeeds in even further articulating his artistic intentions, which have in recent analyses been qualified as post-ironic.

Limitations of Postmodern Irony: How David Foster Wallace Writes a Superior Critique of American Consumerism in Infinite Jest Compared with Bret Easton Ellis’s ‘American Psycho’

ABSTRACT David Foster Wallace witnessed how postmodern irony erodes cultural values by exposing the artifice of language and its human construction. The most egregious example Wallace found was the bestseller American Psycho (1991), by Bret Easton Ellis, which used postmodern irony to satirize American consumer culture in a way Wallace found overly cynical and too reductive. In this article, I explain how Wallace attempted his own critique of American consumer culture with Infinite Jest (1996) but used character-driven narratives to both critique consumerism and offer a humanistic alternative. I end with a discussion of how “New Sincerity,” a literary movement typified by Wallace and George Saunders, provides a model that uses postmodern irony to critique social structures that damage human lives, demonstrated by the narratives of Infinite Jest and Saunders’s short story “Sea Oak.”

SOCIAL AND CULTURAL PHENOMENON OF «NEW SINCERITY»

In the late ХХth and early ХХІst century new cultural paradigms were declared, in particular, metamodernism and «new sincerity». Estimates of the latter are ambiguous: some see it as the dominant mood of the modern era, others – only as the marketing or artistic strategy. The author believes that the social and cultural potential of postmodern irony has not been exhausted yet. In the information society, irony is an anti-repressive mechanism, as well as the way of constituting personal space in a manipulative environment. So it is still premature and even dangerous to devalue it. Irony is born of disappointment and coexists with sensuality and romanticism. In fact, T. Vermeulen and R. van den Akker, characterizing metamodernism as a combination of irony and sincerity, only pointed out to another neo-romantic turn in art. However, adherents of different versions of post-postmodernism refer to the objective socio-economic and technological factors that led to the transformation of culture. These include the digital revolution, globalization and the victory of consumerism, global risks and disasters. Although it is doubtful that commercialization and fear contribute to the deepening of the inner life and its sincere manifestation. The socio-cultural character of the digital age really has such features as spontaneity and enthusiasm. If irony is the desire for independence, then «new sincerity» indicates addiction to something. Unlike the ironist, the «new sincere» does not avoid making choice, but to talk about the revival of existence is to ignore the dependency on manipulative influences. Despite the autism attributed to the new character, he or she is a collectivist who is actively involved in projects not only in virtual space but also in real life. Sharing practices make them accustomed to trust others. They consume any product of mass culture, appropriate any ideas. Being infantile and uneducated, in contradiction to the ironists, they are not ashamed of it, not least because they are not alone in their hobbies. At the same time, the socio-cultural context devalues direct judgments and generates meta-irony. It arises from an atmosphere of total venality, demonstrativeness, standardness, which does not confirm sincerity. As a result, in addition to or instead of accusations of banality and naivety, which were initially envisioned by the adherents of the «new sincerity», it provokes accusations of artificiality and cynicism.

ПОСТМОДЕРНИСТСКАЯ РЕАЛЬНОСТЬ ДЖОНА ФАУЛЗА («Женщина французского лейтенанта»)

The present paper is aimed at studying the artistic mind of the modern English writer John Fowles as the creator of the original worldview in its postmodern style. It has been specified that British artistic culture does not demonstrate neither the extremes, peculiar to the art of “transition” or “frontier” nor sharp denial of everything that seemed inviolable. Inclining towards realistic forms of the English classics, a lot of postmodern authors, including Fowles, prefer a synthesis of the old with the new. This applies both to postmodernism and all avant-garde and neo-avant-garde movements, aimed at fundamental changing of the general ideas about the beauty and ugliness. “The French Lieutenant’s Woman”, written by John Fowles, proposes such a postmodern synthesis in the context of the “playing with the past” thesis. In his novel, the author presents a special type of “new reality”, corresponding to the period of the profound changes inside the movement during the period starting from the end of the 19th century till the end of the 20th century. Instead of the typical for English literature “hero in search”, the novel under consideration demonstrates an existential type of a man. The above-mentioned hero, who is embodied in the images of Charles and Sarah, seeks his individual freedom and “corrects” his own destiny. It should be emphasized that gaining true freedom is possible only through overcoming various life and social obstacles associated with breaking class and social ties, as well as with great internal suffering. Fowles’s peculiar style of narration helps to reveal the main theme of the novel. The author uses postmodern irony, which is meta-irony, and pastiche. The method of “overlapping epochs” forms an original intertext whereby the semantic field of the novel increases. The literary significance of the outlined method is multifaceted: an elitist reader perceives text-subtext-intertext; a “mass” reader gets acquainted with the work at the level of an entertaining storyline. The author of the article also analyses a mythological component of the novel “The French Lieutenant’s Woman”. A mention should also be made that Fowles in the analysed work acts both as a creator and a destroyer of the socio-ethical and literary myth of the Victorian era. Of primary interest to the writer was the literary myth of the time of Queen Victoria, which in the minds of readers has long been romanticized and become a legend. Therefore, the article shows the connection of everything that happens according to the tradition of English romantic narration and the principles of reformation of characters and situations that no longer correspond to the romantic worldview. The ironic understanding of the gentleman’s code of honor and the object of his passion, the reduction of love conflicts and places of romantic meetings are illustrated by specific examples from the text of the novel. The present paper has also devoted considerable attention to the psychology of the protagonists as well as the problem of the plot and compositional unity of the novel “The French Lieutenant’s Woman”. It is proved that the development of the storyline of the novel is a polystructural and polysemantic phenomenon. If Sarah’s character combines the traditional features of both “woman with a secret” and “infernal woman”, then respect for Charles’s traditional aristocracy is being called into question: it is repeatedly mentioned that he did not receive a Cambridge diploma, that he is an amateur paleontologist, that he considers the possibility of getting married for money, and that there is a very strong element of carnal passion in his romantic relationship with Sarah. The article offers the author’s commentary on the compositional completion of the novel. It is argued that the trinity of the epilogue, first of all, explains the “world-chaos” antithesis. The formula of the dissipating world, according to the author of the article, was supposed to become the basis of the postmodernist text in the original version of the novel “The French Lieutenant’s Woman”.

How to Recover Reality. Neo-Romantic Irony in Post-Postmodern American Fiction

Even though transcendentalism never ceased to be present in American culture, during the first decade of the twenty-first century, the gaze of artists and theorists turned to the ideas of the American Renaissance with a hope that had no place during the reign of postmodern irony. With this in mind, the purpose of this article is to discern the adequacy of Emerson’s philosophy for the recovery of realism through the transcendence of language and a new use of Romantic irony. The previous analysis will take us to the New Sincerity movement. The writers of the generation that followed in the wake of David Foster Wallace’s acted as a bridge between the postmodern and the post-postmodern narrative of the beginning of the new millennium. These young writers based their fiction on a critique of institutionalized irony in order to pave the way for the new post 9/11 novel.

David Foster Wallace and the Audience of Democratic Authority

This article analyzes the thought of American political writer David Foster Wallace. It argues that Wallace’s primary concern as a political writer was the disappearance of authority in contemporary American life, a condition that should be neither celebrated with postmodern irony nor lamented with reactionary conservatism. Instead, Wallace sought a middle way through the seemingly intractable political and cultural conflict of the late twentieth century. Analyzing four of Wallace’s essays—“E Unibus Pluram,” “Up Simba!,” “Authority and American Usage,” and “Host”—that range in topic from political talk radio to the history of American lexicography, this article focuses on three themes: the consequences of visual spectacle for linguistic communication, the place of doubt and certainty in civic life, and the meaning of democratic authority. The article concludes with an assessment of Wallace’s relevance for the twenty-first century.

POST-POSTMODERN CHANGE OF SENSIBILITY IN PAUL AUSTER’S SUNSET PARK

At the turn of the millennium, the young writers of the New Sincerity movement tried to create a new realist literature by getting rid of the destructive power of postmodern irony. The consecrated writers of the old postmodern guard, whose Weltanschauung was conformed to the style and the relativistic reality-processing modes of the previous paradigm, saw this change with scepticism. Nevertheless, there was a change in their sensibility when approaching certain themes. This article analyses Paul Auster’s Sunset Park as paradigmatic example of that shift in order to shed some light on its nature.

Reclamation of the Narrative for the Silenced Voice in Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad

This article analyzes Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, a rewriting of Homeric epic, The Odyssey. Atwood rewrites the story — the saga of gallantry and triumphalism of Odysseus, with narrative shift that brings postmodern irony and parody, self-reflexivity and metafiction, and intertextuality and paratextuality into play. The article tries explore if Atwood’s shifting of narrative orientation of the Homeric epic yields any different and substantial reception and interpretation of the epic in the recent context.Moreover, I demonstrate how Atwood’s reconstruction and subsequently the empowerment of the minor characters unfolds the incompatibilities and discrepancies the official version of Homer’s epic, and brings the marginal voice to the front by granting a variety of narrative access.I argue, giving subject positions to silent agents and using various genres of expression, for instance, history and myth, Atwood, through the deployment of an autodiegetic narrative, brings together gender, genre and language in such a way that results in a decisive shift in conceptualizing the narrative structure for the marginal voice and agency female characters. The article concludes that why rereading of classical and canonical text is crucial to bring the marginals’ claim to a subject position, and produce a different language and literature that allows space for expression subjectivity of characters on the margins

American Eccentric Cinema, by Kim Wilkins

Ever since Jeffrey Sconce discovered the “smart film”—a late twentieth/early twenty-first century sensibility surfacing in the American cinema geared toward the Gen-X indie spectator—numerous studies have appeared to further delineate the typological and taxonomical contours of this recently emergent cinematic trend that markedly functions in “counterdistinction to mainstream Hollywood” (350). Sconce’s notion of the smart film has been directly expanded by Claire Perkins in her 2012 study American Smart Cinema, where she elucidates the larger ramifications of the reception side of smart cinema in order to focus on its “affective force” (4). Revising Jim Collins’s misnomer, the “New Sincerity”, Warren Buckland has, in turn, essentially articulated a new Sincerity, one which is not severed from post-modern irony.

After McCahon at Auckland City Art Gallery: Canonisation and the Market in the 1980s

Can New Zealand postmodernism be described as a post-McCahon condition? Curator Christina Barton’s exhibition after McCahon: some recent configurations in art (1989), at Auckland City Art Gallery, was a critical response to McCahon’s canonisation, registering internal diversity within an institution deeply invested in this status. Strategically invoking McCahon’s name enabled Barton to smuggle a group of younger artists into ACAG’s exhibition programme. The artists in After McCahon explored poststructuralist theory, an expansion of institutional critique, post-punk practices and decolonial politics. These discourses of the 1980s supported the production of works dripping with postmodern irony and acutely conscious of the institutional authority amplifying McCahon’s voice and certifying his blue-chip status.