New Sincerity
Encyclopedia
New sincerity is a term that has been used in music
, aesthetics
, film criticism
, poetry
, literary criticism
and philosophy
, generally to describe art or concepts that run against prevailing modes of postmodernist
irony
or cynicism
.
bands, centered in Austin, Texas
in the years from about 1985 to 1990, who were perceived as reacting to the ironic outlook of then-prominent music movements like punk rock
and New Wave
. The use of "New Sincerity" in connection with these bands began with an off-handed comment by Austin punk rocker/author Jesse Sublett
to his friend, local music writer Margaret Moser. According to author Barry Shank, Sublett said: "All those new sincerity bands, they're crap." Sublett (at his own website) states that he was misquoted, and actually told Moser, "It's all new sincerity to me. . . . It's not my cup of tea." In any event, Moser began using the term in print, and it ended up becoming the catch phrase for these bands.
Nationally, the most successful "New Sincerity" band was The Reivers
(originally called Zeitgeist), who released four well-received albums between 1985 and 1991. True Believers, led by Alejandro Escovedo
and Jon Dee Graham
, also received extensive critical praise and local acclaim in Austin, but the band had difficulty capturing its live sound on recordings, among other problems. Other important "New Sincerity" bands included Doctors Mob, Wild Seeds, and Glass Eye
. Another significant "New Sincerity" figure was the eccentric, critically acclaimed songwriter Daniel Johnston
.
Despite extensive critical attention (including national coverage in Rolling Stone
and a 1985 episode of the MTV
program The Cutting Edge
), none of the "New Sincerity" bands met with much commercial success, and the "scene" ended within a few years.
Other music writers have used "new sincerity" to describe later performers such as Conor Oberst
, Will Oldham
, Cat Power
, Devendra Banhart
, Joanna Newsom
, and Idlewild
, as well as Austin's Okkervil River
and Leatherbag
.
, as a response to the dominant sense of absurdity in late Soviet and post-Soviet culture. In Epstein's words, "Postconceptualism, or the New Sincerity, is an experiment in resuscitating "fallen," dead languages with a renewed pathos of love, sentimentality and enthusiasm.
This conception of "new sincerity" meant the avoidance of cynicism, but not necessarily of irony. In the words of University of California, Berkeley
professor Alexei Yurchak, it "is a particular brand of irony, which is sympathetic and warm, and allows its authors to remain committed to the ideals that they discuss, while also being somewhat ironic about this commitment."
Nowadays New Sincerity is being contraposed not to Soviet literature, but to postmodernism
. Dmitry Vodennikov
has been acclaimed as the leader of the new wave of Russian New Sincerity.
Other critics have suggested "new sincerity" as a descriptive term for work by American filmmakers such as Wes Anderson
, P. T. Anderson, Todd Louiso
, Sofia Coppola
, Michel Gondry
and Charlie Kaufman
, Zach Braff
, and Jared Hess
, and filmmakers from other countries such as Lars von Trier
, the Dogme 95
movement, Aki Kaurismäki
, and Pedro Almodóvar
. The "aesthetics of new sincerity" have also been connected to other art forms including "reality television
, Internet blogs, diary style 'chicklit
' literature, [and] personal videos on You-Tube
. . . . "
predicted, in his 1993 essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction," a new literary movement which would espouse something like the New Sincerity ethos:
In his essay "David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in American Fiction," Adam Kelly argues that Wallace's fiction, and that of his generation, is marked by a revival and theoretical reconception of sincerity, challenging the emphasis on authenticity that dominated twentieth-century literature.
. Related literature includes Wendy Steiner's The Trouble with Beauty, Elaine Scarry
's On Beauty and Being Just, and Bryn Gribben's 2005 Bodies that Shatter: Ekphrasis, Beauty, and the Victorian Body as Art, and the term was taken up designer/film auteur Brady Becker. Related movements may include Post-Postmodernism
, New Puritans
, Stuckism
, and Remodernism
, as well as the Dogme 95
film movement led by Lars von Trier
and others.
of PRI
's The Sound of Young America
, self-described as "the public radio program about things that are awesome." Thorn characterizes New Sincerity as a cultural movement defined by dicta including "Maximum Fun" and "Be More Awesome." It celebrates outsized celebration of joy, and rejects irony, and particularly ironic appreciation of cultural products. Thorn has promoted this concept on his program and in interviews to the point that a scholarly work on Russian post-Soviet aesthetic theory included mention of Thorn as American popularizer of the term "new sincerity." A typical explication of Thorn's concept is this 2006 "Manifesto for the New Sincerity":
In a September 2009 interview, Thorn commented that "'new sincerity'" had begun as "a silly, philosophical movement that me and some friends made up in college" and that "everything that we said was a joke, but at the same time it wasn’t all a joke in the sense that we weren’t being arch or we weren’t being campy. While we were talking about ridiculous, funny things we were sincere about them."
-driven poetry movement, described by Massey as "a ‘new sincerity’ brewing in American poetry -- a contrast to the cold, irony-laden poetry dominating the journals and magazines and new books of poetry." Other poets named as associated with this movement, or its tenets, include David Berman, Catherine Wagner
, Dean Young
, Matt Hart, Tao Lin
, D.S. Chapman, Frederick Seidel
, Arielle Greenberg
, and Karyna McGlynn
.
Music
Music is an art form whose medium is sound and silence. Its common elements are pitch , rhythm , dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture...
, aesthetics
Aesthetics
Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste, and with the creation and appreciation of beauty. It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste...
, film criticism
Film criticism
Film criticism is the analysis and evaluation of films, individually and collectively. In general, this can be divided into journalistic criticism that appears regularly in newspapers, and other popular, mass-media outlets and academic criticism by film scholars that is informed by film theory and...
, poetry
Poetry
Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...
, literary criticism
Literary criticism
Literary criticism is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often informed by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of its methods and goals...
and philosophy
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
, generally to describe art or concepts that run against prevailing modes of postmodernist
Postmodernism
Postmodernism is a philosophical movement evolved in reaction to modernism, the tendency in contemporary culture to accept only objective truth and to be inherently suspicious towards a global cultural narrative or meta-narrative. Postmodernist thought is an intentional departure from the...
irony
Irony
Irony is a rhetorical device, literary technique, or situation in which there is a sharp incongruity or discordance that goes beyond the simple and evident intention of words or actions...
or cynicism
Cynicism
Cynicism , in its original form, refers to the beliefs of an ancient school of Greek philosophers known as the Cynics . Their philosophy was that the purpose of life was to live a life of Virtue in agreement with Nature. This meant rejecting all conventional desires for wealth, power, health, and...
.
New sincerity in music
"New Sincerity" was used as a collective name for a loose group of alternative rockAlternative rock
Alternative rock is a genre of rock music and a term used to describe a diverse musical movement that emerged from the independent music underground of the 1980s and became widely popular by the 1990s...
bands, centered in Austin, Texas
Austin, Texas
Austin is the capital city of the U.S. state of :Texas and the seat of Travis County. Located in Central Texas on the eastern edge of the American Southwest, it is the fourth-largest city in Texas and the 14th most populous city in the United States. It was the third-fastest-growing large city in...
in the years from about 1985 to 1990, who were perceived as reacting to the ironic outlook of then-prominent music movements like punk rock
Punk rock
Punk rock is a rock music genre that developed between 1974 and 1976 in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Rooted in garage rock and other forms of what is now known as protopunk music, punk rock bands eschewed perceived excesses of mainstream 1970s rock...
and New Wave
New Wave music
New Wave is a subgenre of :rock music that emerged in the mid to late 1970s alongside punk rock. The term at first generally was synonymous with punk rock before being considered a genre in its own right that incorporated aspects of electronic and experimental music, mod subculture, disco and 1960s...
. The use of "New Sincerity" in connection with these bands began with an off-handed comment by Austin punk rocker/author Jesse Sublett
Jesse Sublett
Jesse Sublett is a musician and writer from Austin, Texas. As a musician he is best-known for his long-running rock trio, The Skunks...
to his friend, local music writer Margaret Moser. According to author Barry Shank, Sublett said: "All those new sincerity bands, they're crap." Sublett (at his own website) states that he was misquoted, and actually told Moser, "It's all new sincerity to me. . . . It's not my cup of tea." In any event, Moser began using the term in print, and it ended up becoming the catch phrase for these bands.
Nationally, the most successful "New Sincerity" band was The Reivers
The Reivers (band)
The Reivers were a pop band from Austin, Texas. Formed in 1984 as Zeitgeist, they were forced to change their name before releasing their second album in 1987, due to another group claiming prior rights to the name...
(originally called Zeitgeist), who released four well-received albums between 1985 and 1991. True Believers, led by Alejandro Escovedo
Alejandro Escovedo
Alejandro Escovedo is an American singer-songwriter.-Biography:The son of Mexican immigrants to Texas, Escovedo is from a family that boasts several professional musicians, including brothers Coke Escovedo and Pete Escovedo, and Sheila E...
and Jon Dee Graham
Jon Dee Graham
Jon Dee Graham is a musician, guitarist and songwriter from Austin, Texas. He was born February 28, 1959. Graham was named the Austin Musician of the Year during the South by Southwest music conference in 2006...
, also received extensive critical praise and local acclaim in Austin, but the band had difficulty capturing its live sound on recordings, among other problems. Other important "New Sincerity" bands included Doctors Mob, Wild Seeds, and Glass Eye
Glass Eye (band)
Glass Eye were an influential art rock group based in Austin, Texas, and were primarily active from 1983 to 1993. Popular in Austin, and on the college radio and tour circuit, the band's unusual and unique musical style, blending melodic hooks with dissonance and occasional tendencies for the...
. Another significant "New Sincerity" figure was the eccentric, critically acclaimed songwriter Daniel Johnston
Daniel Johnston
Daniel Dale Johnston is an American singer, songwriter, musician, and artist. Johnston was the subject of the 2006 documentary The Devil and Daniel Johnston. He currently lives in Waller, Texas....
.
Despite extensive critical attention (including national coverage in Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone is a US-based magazine devoted to music, liberal politics, and popular culture that is published every two weeks. Rolling Stone was founded in San Francisco in 1967 by Jann Wenner and music critic Ralph J...
and a 1985 episode of the MTV
MTV
MTV, formerly an initialism of Music Television, is an American network based in New York City that launched on August 1, 1981. The original purpose of the channel was to play music videos guided by on-air hosts known as VJs....
program The Cutting Edge
I.R.S. Records Presents The Cutting Edge
I.R.S. Records Presents The Cutting Edge was a music program that aired on MTV from March 1983 to September 1987, on the last Sunday of every month. The first year of the show featured a variety of hosts including Jools Holland, Jeffrey Vallance, and Wazmo Nariz before settling on Peter Zaremba,...
), none of the "New Sincerity" bands met with much commercial success, and the "scene" ended within a few years.
Other music writers have used "new sincerity" to describe later performers such as Conor Oberst
Conor Oberst
Conor Mullen Oberst is an American singer-songwriter best known for his work in Bright Eyes. He has also played in several other bands, including Desaparecidos, Norman Bailer , Commander Venus, Park Ave., Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band, and Monsters of Folk.-Musical career:Oberst began...
, Will Oldham
Will Oldham
Will Oldham , better known by the stage name Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, is an American singer-songwriter and actor. From 1993 to 1997, he performed and recorded under variations of the Palace name, including the Palace Brothers, Palace Songs, and Palace Music...
, Cat Power
Cat Power
Charlyn Marie Marshall , also known as Chan Marshall or by her stage name Cat Power, is an American singer/songwriter and occasional actress and model. Cat Power was originally the name of Marshall's first band, but has come to refer to her musical projects with various backing bands...
, Devendra Banhart
Devendra Banhart
Devendra Obi Banhart is a singer-songwriter and visual artist. Banhart was born in Houston, Texas and was raised by his mother in Venezuela, until he moved to California as a teenager. He began to study at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1998, but dropped out to perform music in Europe, San...
, Joanna Newsom
Joanna Newsom
Joanna Newsom is an American harpist, pianist and singer-songwriter from Nevada City, California.- Early life :Newsom grew up in the small town of Nevada City, California...
, and Idlewild
Idlewild (band)
Idlewild are a Scottish rock band, formed in Edinburgh, in 1995, comprising Roddy Woomble , Rod Jones , Colin Newton , Allan Stewart and Gareth Russell...
, as well as Austin's Okkervil River
Okkervil River
Okkervil River is an indie rock band from Austin, Texas. Formed in 1998, the band takes its name from a short story by Russian author Tatyana Tolstaya. They self-released their first album, Stars Too Small to Use, which led them to the South by Southwest music festival. After recording their first...
and Leatherbag
Leatherbag (band)
Leatherbag is a rock band from Austin, Texas formed in 2005 by songwriter Randy Reynolds after he moved from Houston. The band's name comes from a passage in the James Joyce novel, Finnegans Wake....
.
New sincerity in Russia
In Russia, the term new sincerity (novaia iskrennost) was used as early as the mid 1980s or early 1990s by dissident poet Dmitry Prigov and critic Mikhail EpsteinMikhail Epstein
Mikhail Naumovich Epstein is an American literary theorist and critical thinker. He is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Cultural Theory and Russian Literature at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia...
, as a response to the dominant sense of absurdity in late Soviet and post-Soviet culture. In Epstein's words, "Postconceptualism, or the New Sincerity, is an experiment in resuscitating "fallen," dead languages with a renewed pathos of love, sentimentality and enthusiasm.
This conception of "new sincerity" meant the avoidance of cynicism, but not necessarily of irony. In the words of University of California, Berkeley
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
professor Alexei Yurchak, it "is a particular brand of irony, which is sympathetic and warm, and allows its authors to remain committed to the ideals that they discuss, while also being somewhat ironic about this commitment."
Nowadays New Sincerity is being contraposed not to Soviet literature, but to postmodernism
Postmodernism
Postmodernism is a philosophical movement evolved in reaction to modernism, the tendency in contemporary culture to accept only objective truth and to be inherently suspicious towards a global cultural narrative or meta-narrative. Postmodernist thought is an intentional departure from the...
. Dmitry Vodennikov
Dmitry Vodennikov
Dmitry Vodennikov is a Russian poet and essayistIn 2002, he was named as one of the ten best living Russian poets in a poll of 110 leading Russian poets and critics, being one of just two poets under 35 in the top ten. Some critics name him as "perhaps the best known poet of his generation",...
has been acclaimed as the leader of the new wave of Russian New Sincerity.
New sincerity in film criticism
Critic Jim Collins introduced the concept of "new sincerity" to film criticism in his 1993 essay entitled “Genericity in the 90s: Eclectic Irony and the New Sincerity.” In this essay he contrasts films that treat genre conventions with "eclectic irony" and those that treat them seriously, with "new sincerity." Collins describes
the 'new sincerity' of films like Field of Dreams (1989), Dances With Wolves (1990), and Hook (1991), all of which depend not on hybridization, but on an "ethnographic" rewriting of the classic genre film that serves as their inspiration, all attempting, using one strategy or another, to recover a lost "purity," which apparently pre-existed even the Golden Age of film genre.
Other critics have suggested "new sincerity" as a descriptive term for work by American filmmakers such as Wes Anderson
Wes Anderson
Wesley Wales Anderson is an American film director, screenwriter, actor, and producer of features, short films and commercials....
, P. T. Anderson, Todd Louiso
Todd Louiso
Todd Louiso is an American film actor and film director best known for his role as timid record store clerk Dick in High Fidelity, opposite Jack Black and John Cusack. Other supporting roles include School For Scoundrels. Louiso directed his first film in 2002, the acclaimed Love Liza with Philip...
, Sofia Coppola
Sofia Coppola
Sofia Carmina Coppola is an American screenwriter, film director, actress, and producer.In 2003 she received the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Lost in Translation, and became the third woman to be nominated for an Academy Award for Directing...
, Michel Gondry
Michel Gondry
Michel Gondry is an Academy Award winning filmmaker, whose works include being a commercial director, music video director, and a screenwriter. He is noted for his inventive visual style and manipulation of mise en scène. - Life and career :...
and Charlie Kaufman
Charlie Kaufman
Charles Stuart "Charlie" Kaufman is an American screenwriter, producer, and director. His film work includes Being John Malkovich, Human Nature, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Synecdoche, New York...
, Zach Braff
Zach Braff
Zachary Israel "Zach" Braff is an American actor, screenwriter, producer, comedian, and director. Braff first became known in 2001 for his role as Dr. John Dorian on the television series Scrubs, for which he was nominated for an Emmy Award and three Golden Globe Awards.In 2004, Braff made his...
, and Jared Hess
Jared Hess
Jared Lawrence Hess is an American filmmaker known for his work Napoleon Dynamite and Nacho Libre , which he co-wrote and directed with his wife, Jerusha Hess....
, and filmmakers from other countries such as Lars von Trier
Lars von Trier
Lars von Trier is a Danish film director and screenwriter. He is closely associated with the Dogme 95 collective, although his own films have taken a variety of different approaches, and have frequently received strongly divided critical opinion....
, the Dogme 95
Dogme 95
Dogme 95 was an avant-garde filmmaking movement started in 1995 by the Danish directors Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, who created the "Dogme 95 Manifesto" and the "Vow of Chastity". These were rules to create filmmaking based on the traditional values of story, acting, and theme, and...
movement, Aki Kaurismäki
Aki Kaurismäki
-Career:After studying Media Studies at the University of Tampere, Aki Kaurismäki started his career as a co-director in the films of his elder brother Mika Kaurismäki. His debut as an independent director was Crime and Punishment , Dostoyevsky's famous crime story set in modern-day Helsinki...
, and Pedro Almodóvar
Pedro Almodóvar
Pedro Almodóvar Caballero is a Spanish film director, screenwriter and producer.Almodóvar is arguably the most successful and internationally known Spanish filmmaker of his generation. His films, marked by complex narratives, employ the codes of melodrama and use elements of pop culture, popular...
. The "aesthetics of new sincerity" have also been connected to other art forms including "reality television
Reality television
Reality television is a genre of television programming that presents purportedly unscripted dramatic or humorous situations, documents actual events, and usually features ordinary people instead of professional actors, sometimes in a contest or other situation where a prize is awarded...
, Internet blogs, diary style 'chicklit
Chick lit
Chick lit is genre fiction which addresses issues of modern womanhood, often humorously and lightheartedly. The genre sold well during the 1990s and 2000s, with chick lit titles topping bestseller lists and the creation of imprints devoted entirely to chick lit...
' literature, [and] personal videos on You-Tube
YouTube
YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos....
. . . . "
New sincerity in literary criticism
In response to the hegemony of metafictional and self-conscious irony in contemporary fiction, writer David Foster WallaceDavid Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace was an American author of novels, essays, and short stories, and a professor at Pomona College in Claremont, California...
predicted, in his 1993 essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction," a new literary movement which would espouse something like the New Sincerity ethos:
"The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal.” To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows. "
In his essay "David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in American Fiction," Adam Kelly argues that Wallace's fiction, and that of his generation, is marked by a revival and theoretical reconception of sincerity, challenging the emphasis on authenticity that dominated twentieth-century literature.
New sincerity in philosophy
"New sincerity" has also sometimes been used to refer to a philosophical concept deriving from the basic tenets of performatism. It is also seen as one of the key characteristics of metamodernismMetamodernism
Metamodernism is a term employed to situate and explain recent developments across current affairs, critical theory, philosophy, architecture, art, cinema, music and literature which are emerging from and reacting to postmodernism.- Definitions :...
. Related literature includes Wendy Steiner's The Trouble with Beauty, Elaine Scarry
Elaine Scarry
Elaine Scarry , a professor of English and American Literature and Language, is the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University...
's On Beauty and Being Just, and Bryn Gribben's 2005 Bodies that Shatter: Ekphrasis, Beauty, and the Victorian Body as Art, and the term was taken up designer/film auteur Brady Becker. Related movements may include Post-Postmodernism
Post-Postmodernism
Post-postmodernism is a term applied to a wide-ranging set of developments in critical theory, philosophy, architecture, art, literature, and culture which are emerging from and reacting to postmodernism.-Periodization:...
, New Puritans
New Puritans
The New Puritans was a literary movement ascribed to the contributors to a 2000 anthology of short stories entitled All Hail the New Puritans, edited by Nicholas Blincoe and Matt Thorne. The project is said to have been inspired by the Dogme 95 manifesto for cinematic minimalism and authenticity...
, Stuckism
Stuckism
Stuckism is an international art movement founded in 1999 by Billy Childish and Charles Thomson to promote figurative painting in opposition to conceptual art...
, and Remodernism
Remodernism
Remodernism revives aspects of modernism, particularly in its early form, and follows postmodernism, to which it contrasts. Adherents of remodernism advocate it as a forward and radical, not reactionary, impetus....
, as well as the Dogme 95
Dogme 95
Dogme 95 was an avant-garde filmmaking movement started in 1995 by the Danish directors Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, who created the "Dogme 95 Manifesto" and the "Vow of Chastity". These were rules to create filmmaking based on the traditional values of story, acting, and theme, and...
film movement led by Lars von Trier
Lars von Trier
Lars von Trier is a Danish film director and screenwriter. He is closely associated with the Dogme 95 collective, although his own films have taken a variety of different approaches, and have frequently received strongly divided critical opinion....
and others.
New sincerity in The Sound of Young America
"The New Sincerity" has been espoused since 2002 by radio host Jesse ThornJesse Thorn
Jesse Thorn is an American public radio show host/creator. He is the host and producer of the radio show and podcast The Sound of Young America, which is distributed by Public Radio International to 25 public terrestrial radio stations in 13 states and is also broadcast weekly on XM Radio's "XM...
of PRI
Public Radio International
Public Radio International is a Minneapolis-based American public radio organization, with locations in Boston, New York, London and Beijing. PRI's tagline is "Hear a different voice." PRI is a major public media content creator and also distributes programs from many sources...
's The Sound of Young America
The Sound of Young America
The Sound of Young America is a public radio program and podcast based in Los Angeles, California and distributed by Public Radio International...
, self-described as "the public radio program about things that are awesome." Thorn characterizes New Sincerity as a cultural movement defined by dicta including "Maximum Fun" and "Be More Awesome." It celebrates outsized celebration of joy, and rejects irony, and particularly ironic appreciation of cultural products. Thorn has promoted this concept on his program and in interviews to the point that a scholarly work on Russian post-Soviet aesthetic theory included mention of Thorn as American popularizer of the term "new sincerity." A typical explication of Thorn's concept is this 2006 "Manifesto for the New Sincerity":
What is The New Sincerity? Think of it as irony and sincerity combined like VoltronVoltronVoltron is the titular super robot of an anime series that features a team of young pilots, known as the Voltron Force. The team’s individual vehicles join together to form the giant super robot, with which they defend the galaxy from evil...
, to form a new movement of astonishing power. Or think of it as the absence of irony and sincerity, where less is (obviously) more. If those strain the brain, just think of Evel KnievelEvel KnievelEvel Knievel , born Robert Craig Knievel, was an American daredevil and entertainer. In his career he attempted over 75 ramp-to-ramp motorcycle jumps between 1965 and 1980, and in 1974, a failed jump across Snake River Canyon in the Skycycle X-2, a steam-powered rocket...
. Let's be frank. There's no way to appreciate Evel Knievel literally. Evel is the kind of man who defies even fiction, because the reality is too over the top. Here is a man in a red-white-and-blue leather jumpsuit, driving some kind of rocket car. A man who achieved fame and fortune jumping over things. Here is a real man who feels at home as Spidey on the cover of a comic book. Simply put, Evel Knievel boggles the mind. But by the same token, he isn't to be taken ironically, either. The fact of the matter is that Evel is, in a word, awesome. . . . Our greeting: a double thumbs-up. Our credo: "Be More Awesome." Our lifestyle: "Maximum Fun." Throw caution to the wind, friend, and live The New Sincerity.
In a September 2009 interview, Thorn commented that "'new sincerity'" had begun as "a silly, philosophical movement that me and some friends made up in college" and that "everything that we said was a joke, but at the same time it wasn’t all a joke in the sense that we weren’t being arch or we weren’t being campy. While we were talking about ridiculous, funny things we were sincere about them."
New sincerity in American poetry
Since 2005, poets including Reb Livingston, Joseph Massey, Andrew Mister, and Anthony Robinson have collaborated in a blogBlog
A blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...
-driven poetry movement, described by Massey as "a ‘new sincerity’ brewing in American poetry -- a contrast to the cold, irony-laden poetry dominating the journals and magazines and new books of poetry." Other poets named as associated with this movement, or its tenets, include David Berman, Catherine Wagner
Catherine Wagner
-Life:Wagner lived in Asia and the Middle East until 1977, when her family moved to Baltimore, Maryland.She graduated from University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, University of Iowa , and University of Utah ....
, Dean Young
Dean Young (poet)
Dean Young is a contemporary American poet in the poetic lineage of John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and Kenneth Koch. Often cited as a second-generation New York School poet, Young also derives influence and inspiration from the work of André Breton, Paul Éluard, and the other French Surrealist poets,...
, Matt Hart, Tao Lin
Tao Lin
Tao Lin is an American writer. He was born of Taiwanese parents and grew up on the East Coast of the USA.He is the author of two novels, Eeeee Eee Eeee and Richard Yates ; a novella, Shoplifting from American Apparel ; a short story collection, Bed ; and two poetry collections, you are a little...
, D.S. Chapman, Frederick Seidel
Frederick Seidel
-Career:In 1962, his first book, Final Solutions, was chosen by a jury of Louise Bogan, Stanley Kunitz, and Robert Lowell for an award sponsored by the 92nd Street Y, with a $1,500 prize...
, Arielle Greenberg
Arielle Greenberg
Arielle Greenberg is a Feminist Poet and the poetry editor of Black Clock. She is most renowned for naming and describing the concept of the Gurlesque in the anthology Gurlesque: the new grrly, grotesque, burlesque poetics which she co-edited with Lara Glenum.-Biography:Greenberg was an assistant...
, and Karyna McGlynn
Karyna McGlynn
Karyna McGlynn is an American poet.She is a poet and critic associated with spoken-word, New Sincerity, and New Confessionalism.Karyna first became popular as a performance poet in the poetry slam scene in the late 1990s, regularly performing at the Electric Lounge and South by Southwest...
.