The New Sincerity is a provocative mode of literary interpretation that focuses intensely on coherent connections that texts can build with readers who are primed to seek out narratives and literary works that rest on clear and stable relationships between dialectics of interior/exterior, self/others, and meaning/expression. Studies on The New Sincerity so far have focused on how it should be situated against dominant literary movements such as postmodernism. My dissertation aims for a more positive definition, unfolding the most essential details of The New Sincerity in three parts: by exploring the intellectual history of the term “sincerity” and related ideas (such as authenticity); by establishing the historical context that created the conditions that led to The New Sincerity’s genesis in the 1990s; and by tracing the different forms reading with The New Sincerity can take by analyzing a diverse body of literary texts. The works of literature I examine come from a very brief span in the final decade of the twentieth century, but there are innumerable avenues for future research and study that can expand the study of The New Sincerity.

https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1789&context=oa_diss

The New Sincerity in American Literature

egory of "minimalism." Indeed, during the turbulent debates of the eighties the term appears to have been ruined for literary criticism, as it was increasingly used to denigrate what was deemed second-rate workshop prose merely turning "less" into "a lot less" (Aldridge 45).1 As a result, critics intending to prove Carver's literariness often feel compelled to preface their arguments with disclaimers, emphasizing that he is first and foremost an original storyteller and only tenuously related to the minimalist trend. There is a tendency in Carver criticism to reclaim him for a more traditionally realist poetics and argue that his minimalist leanings were merely part of a brief phase, too insignificant to be taken seriously. A. O. Scott's New York Review of Books article "Looking for Raymond Carver" is an eloquent and representative example of this opinion.

Reconsidering Raymond Carver's "Development": The Revisions of "So Much Water so Close to Home"

This thesis addresses a creative writing approach to exploring reader empathy through the critical analysis of writing devices implemented by contemporary American short fiction writers and through creative experimentation through a written collection of short stories. It explores the ways in which writers can implement specific literary devices
to potentially affect a reader's emotional reaction to a character or situation. The specified devices in this research have been utilised by contemporary American authors in their short fiction collections, namely Lydia Davis (The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis), George Saunders (Tenth of December), and David Foster Wallace (Brief Interviews with Hideous
Men), who have influenced reader empathy in their short stories.
Two categories of devices are in focus: narrative perspective and story format. These categories are signified due to contemporary American authors' experimentation with these devices and due to their inclusion in literary theory on reader empathy and fiction, namely Suzanne Keen's theory of narrative empathy. She focuses on the importance of reader empathy (namely, the effects that fiction can have on a reader in reality) and discusses
devices that writers have used to possibly evoke these emotions. Keen explores the relationship between a reader and character identification, with a further emphasis on reader
empathy and reader altruism in an inter-disciplinary setting, stating that reader empathy may lead to reader altruism; however, little to no research has been conducted on the creative implementation of writing techniques in regards to reader empathy from the perspective of
a creative writer.
 Through creative application, this thesis aims to show the ways in which devices explored by narrative theorists can create the possibility for reader empathy. Therefore, the
thesis takes into account first-, second-, and third-person narrative perspectives and question and answer (Q&A), short-short (a.k.a. flash fiction), and segmented formats through literary analysis of contemporary short fiction and through writing experimentation in the form of a short story collection.
 The thesis aims to explore the creative use of these devices and their linkage to reader reaction by the production of a short fiction collection entitled Fragmented Perceptions: A Collection of Characters. This creative work intends to implement the specified devices
researched in order to experiment with perspective and format in relation to a possible empathetic connection of the reader to a character. Finally, by analysing possible effects on
reader empathy through devices employed in the creative work, the thesis explores ways in which authors can use narrative perspective and format to discover various ways in which a writer can implement devices to affect reader empathy through short fiction.

Fragmented perspectives: creating empathy through experiments in form and perspective in short fiction

John Barth is primarily known as a writer of long fiction. He published
several novels, essays, 3 novellas and 2 collections of short fiction: Lost in the
Funhouse (1968) and On with the Story: Stories (1996). With this last collection it
had taken him almost 30 years to return to the genre of the short story. He always
said he preferred writing long fiction over short fiction. As he wrote in one of his
essays, “Borges and I”: “the short story ha[d] never been [his] long suit” (Fridays
169). His latest short story collection is called A Book of Ten Nights and a Night:
Eleven Stories (2004).

Boundary crossings: John Barth's renewed love affair with the short story

Summary John Barth's return to the short story after an absence of almost 30 years in the genre has been heralded by the publication of two collections of short stories. Both collections signify a valuable building block in his life-long encyclopaedic project on the origin of fiction, its viability and its survival. In vintage-Barth style, narration is theorised and theory is narrativised in the self-conscious short narratives. Playing with different narrative levels helps Barth in teasing out what constitutes a story, what constitutes the ground truths of narrative theory. The narrative process is defined as a complex (or chaotic) system of suspended, yet incessant, motion. Thus the narrative process is simultaneously linear and non-linear. In the second collection we find the author also questioning the function of (apparently) trivial stories in the aftermath of 9/11. Storytelling may be a distraction from catastrophe, but it is not an escape. It is conceived of as a life-giving urge, while its functio...

Boundary Crossings: John Barth's Renewed Love Affair with the Short Story

Entangled on one side with the tribe, on another with the marketplace, the short story inhabits postmodernity differently from the novel. It moves differently, and in ways still unarticulated, on the force field of contemporary culture, participating in what Fredric Jameson has called a "revival of storytelling knowledge" in the postmodern world and giving voice to the increased "vitality of small narrative units" (Foreword xi) but inadequately explained with respect both to its modernist precursors in Chekhov, Joyce, and Welty and to its raw materials, life at the end of the twentieth century. While a few story writers (Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, William Gass, and Max Apple, among them) have advanced under the sign of the postmodern, producing in sometimes-brilliant miniature the kinds of metafictional, anti-mimetic, ontologically indeterminate narration writ large in the postmodern novel, many recent stories appear to have no significant share in those ironies and indeterminacies. The working class passivity of Raymond Carver's characters, the middle-class anomie of Ann Beattie's seem no more than lifelike, minutely reflective of individual alienation and disarray in America but unaffected by postmodern disruptions of discursive practice and the dislodging of referentiality. I want to argue here, however, that beneath the finely drawn neo-realist surfaces of their stories writers like Carver and Beattie, Grace Paley, Mary Robison, Jayne Anne Phillips and others mark out the radical troubling of realist claims; beyond their modernist inheritance they surrender in small ways and little narratives the expectation of epiphany, the hope for metaphysical consolation in a fragmenting world, a lingering commitment to a transcendental subject. The end of epiphany and the exhaustion of familiar reading strategies and genre definitions call for new ways of reading and for a redefinition of both the narrative and the cultural logic of short fiction. Unlike the unified, complex modernist short story, grounded in image or metaphor and moving toward revelation, many stories of the last decade and a half are marked by depthlessness, incoherence, and ephemerality. In a bitter attack on American fiction, particularly short fiction, in the 1980s, John W. Aldridge gives voice to the disappointment of readers in search of insight: Memory is given nothing to retain, nor form in which the harmonious relation of part to part creates a pattern on which the mind is able to construct a memory. . . There is no evidence that these experiences are meant to coalesce into drama or so arrange themselves as to produce some climactic insight into a truth about the human condition. (35) Both Aldridge's complaint and his diagnosis (too many writer's workshops, too little of silence, exile and cunning) are echoed in other reviews and commentaries on the state of the story, most recently by Madison Smartt Bell, who remarks on the temporal depthlessness and "weird foreshortening" of contemporary stories (58-59). Still, contemporary stories have readers, perhaps more readers than ever before. From the late 1970s to the present, the genre has seen a revived or at least a sustained popularity among American book buyers. Although mass-circulation magazine outlets for the story dwindled,(1) little magazines (some of them underwritten by commercial houses, as Quarterly was by Random House) and writing workshops flourished. Story annuals and anthologies multiplied. Between January 1988 and December 1992 American trade book publishers brought out nearly twice as many single-author volumes of short stories as during a comparable period between 1973 and 1977.(2) By most accounts the story's fate in the American book market improved dramatically during the 1980s. "Has there ever been a time like the present for short story writers? I don't think so," Raymond Carver mused in a late piece on contemporary fiction, "An author who publishes a collection of stories can expect to sell, generally speaking, roughly the same number of copies as his or her novelist counterpart. …

Miriam Marty Clark

Papers

Contemporary Short Fiction and the Postmodern Condition