Humor after Postmodernism: David Foster Wallace and Proximal Irony

Bequeathing “new sincerity” in the age of the homo digitalis: Confessionalism and authorial self‐consciousness in David Foster Wallace and Bo Burnham

“…Wallace himself attested to this desire for a shift in his renowned “E Unibus Pluram” (1993), admitting to his own potential “lack of vision” in finding a way to exploit U.S. fiction's possibilities to allow the “back[ing] away from ironic watching” and the “endors[ing of] single‐entendre values” that he held could be central to the following generation's approach to story‐telling (192). The interpretation of “New Sincerity” resulting from this shift is polyonymous, as it is similarly echoed in the preceding notion of “Post‐Postmodern Discontent” (McLaughlin, 2004), which diagnosed a turn away from “self‐conscious wordplay and the violation of narrative conventions” and the embracing of a new middle‐ground where postmodernist form might merge with the mimetic aspirations of old (66–67), as well as in Lee Konstantinou's later “Postironic Belief” (2012), which alludes to Wallace's ambition to have his fiction result in the construction of “ethical countertypes” that could weaponize belief—in the possibility of communication, emotional communion, and the like—against the anti‐earnest, detached stance of the “incredulous ironist” (85), or in Wilson Kaiser's “proximal irony” (2013), described as “a style of writing that maintains its playful sensibility while also acknowledging an un‐distanced emotional involvement with the narrative's characters and events” (31).…”