Preface: A consideration of the New Sincerity movement in contemporary American poetics in the work of Tao Lin, Matt Hart, and Dorothea Lasky. Creative work: A three section book of poetry exploring elegy, form, and the intersection of strangeness and domesticity.

My thesis examines the “New Sincerity,” a recent movement in contemporary fiction, which relies upon and reclaims the ethical concept of sincerity. Rather than accept sincerity at face value, however, I outline a historical trajectory of the concept in order to understand the reasons for its decline and the current attempts to resituate it. Contrasting sincerity with its ancient Grecian root of parrhēsia, I argue that sincerity has been historically mobilized as a mechanism of oppression. Since the traditional conception of sincerity was founded upon the depth model of subjectivity, certain individuals were denied the possibility of professing sincerity; rather, their outward appearances marked them a priori as being deceitful, hypocritical and insincere. Despite the recent theoretical decline of the depth model of subjectivity, I claim that the model has persisted in an afterlife that continues to govern who is given the license and freedom to speak. As such, sincerity has had a significant role in how marginalized subjects, who are often denigrated for being overly emotional, have been categorized as insincere and sentimental. For this reason, my thesis rejects the alleged return of sincerity in favor of a reconceptualization of it. Drawing from the “performative turn,” I claim that sincerity must be continually at risk for it to draw its affective potential. If sincerity with intention is insincere, sincerity is an impossible event that cannot be claimed in advance. Rather, we must bind ourselves to the truth similar to the parrhēsiates of Ancient Greek and take care to question the other. In doing so, sincerity becomes a truth-telling based on actions instead of judgments. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

This essay investigates the prospect of Romantic Irony’s potential resurgence in contemporary poetics and discusses its relevance and likeness with metamodernism. The internet has by now not only seeped into, but fully permeated, the process of literary production and distribution. The effect of this has been the birth of a new kind of poetic discourse which can broadly be called metamodernism, The New Sincerity or Alt-lit. This movement is characterized by its self-reflexive metacommentary, fragmentary nature and an oscillation between of irony and sincerity. Vermeulen and Akker, among others, have hinted at metamodernism’s relation to Romanticism, but research into the specifics of its tendency towards Romantic Irony is scarce. By viewing the writings of Steve Roggenbuck (a central figure in the new poetic movement), alongside the philosophy of Friedrich Schlegel, I propose a comparative framework for discussion of sincerity, irony and the instrumentalization of contemporary metamodernist writing. I demonstrate that Roggenbuck’s writing displays narratological, tropological and thematic tendencies commonly associated with both Romantic Irony and metamodernism. Apart from broader structural comparison, I attempt a comparative analysis between Roggenbuck’s poetry (2010-2015) and Thomas Carlyle’s novel “Sartor Resartus” (1833-1834) in order to provide a visualisation of the rhetorical and narratological strategies of Romantic Irony. I aim to frame Romantic Irony as a sensibility, or mode of discourse - rather than a strict system of thought - which may still be at work today. In extension, the sensibilities of Romantic Irony may shed further light into the philosophical potential of the seemingly incomprehensible and contradictory tendencies of metamodernism. By ironicizing its poetic form, literary ambition and desire for sincerity in a post-postmodern era, Roggenbuck’s poetry celebrates ambiguity and literary failure, ultimately framing irony as a constructive and potentially democratic operation.

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