https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7247-8981
![Sample our Language & Literature journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5941/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Language-Literature.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
This paper proposes that a transformation of the New Sincerity aesthetics has taken place in Zadie Smith’s short fiction. This shift is explored through an analysis of some of the short stories in Smith’s most recent collection, Grand Union, opposite David Foster Wallace’s “Octet”, one of the foundational fictions of the literary New Sincerity. Their respective approaches to authenticity considered, Smith is argued to have partially departed from the other-directed concern with the reader that had shaped Wallace’s outlook on sincerity, and thus to stand at a productive intersection between postmodernist form, the anticipatory disposition of New Sincerity aesthetes, and the unquestioned, unironic embrace of single-entendre values that Wallace prophesied for the twenty-first century.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Kelly, “DFW and the New Sincerity”.
2 Kelly, “Language between Lyricism”, 54.
3 Minor Feelings, 70.
4 “Notes on NW”, 248.
5 “Brief Interviews”, 261.
6 “Zadie Smith's Bookshelf”.
7 “In Memoriam”.
8 “Brief Interviews”, 264.
9 Ibid., 272.
10 Wood, “Human, All Too Inhuman”.
11 Ercolino, “The Maximalist Novel”, 241.
12 Ibid., 242.
13 Inter-semiocity, understood in Ercolino’s text as the way in which the maximalist novel draws on the contemporary imaginary’s polymorphic quality by appealing to multiple expressive experiences and crossing borders, would function in a manner altogether different in the short story tradition. This feature might nonetheless be traced to Wallace and Smith’s short story collections, as they often work as short story cycles. Thus, thematic and structural relationships tie the tales together, affording each individual piece the possibility of sharing others’ semiotic codes and contributing to their frequent commentary on the polymorphic quality of the late postmodernist imaginary.
14 Openness and incompleteness are matters that have been argued to stand at the heart of short fiction aesthetics, and yet completeness is a feature in Ercolino’s taxonomy that could be disputed to respond to short fiction’s logic as much as it does to the novel’s. Indeed, the very notion of completeness could be problematised in this context, especially given how Ercolino appears to use completeness and closure indistinctly (248). The economy of the short story often affords tales a sense of completeness of their own – for “of the short story proper, it is always true that it could be nothing else but what it is” (Dawson, “The Modern Short Story”, 802) – that coexists with a sense of openness – given how the short story’s “essential form” is often described as one that “denies closure and accepts ambiguity as central to its being” (Rohrberger, “Preface”, xi).
15 Wallace, “An Expanded Interview”, 24.
16 Martha and Hanwell, vii.
17 “E Unibus Pluram”, 151.
18 Wallace, “DFW Winces at the Suggestion”, 70–71.
19 Wallace, “The Salon Interview”, 62.
20 Zadie Smith, interview by Synne Rifbjerg, “Such Painful Knowledge”, August 2017, 4:26-24:56.
21 “The I Who Is Not Me”, 333.
22 Zadie Smith, interview by Synne Rifbjerg, “Such Painful Knowledge”, August 2017, 13:07-13:15.
23 13:17-13:45.
24 Grand Union, 199.
25 The Broom of the System, 467.
26 Grand Union, 179.
27 Eve, Literature Against Criticism, 120.
28 Wallace, “An Expanded Interview”, 26.
29 Smith, “Fascinated to Presume”.
30 Holland, “Mediated Immediacy”, 107.
31 Boswell, Understanding David Foster Wallace, 185–6.
32 Wallace, “An Expanded Interview” ,40.
33 Boddy, “A Fiction of Response”, 25.
34 Kelly, “DFW and the New Sincerity”, 136.
35 Wallace, Brief Interviews, 133.
36 “How (Not) to Make People Like You”, 64.
37 Brief Interviews, 133.
38 Hudson, “DFW Is Not Your Friend”, 10.
39 “Zadie Smith's Short Stories”, 171.
40 “‘Post-Hysterics,”’, 69.
41 Ibid., 73.
42 Grand Union, 75.
43 Ibid., 107.
44 Ibid., 186.
45 Ibid., 188.
46 Ibid., 193.
47 Ibid., 203.
48 Ibid., 42.
49 Ibid.
50 Ibid., 64.
51 “The I Who Is Not Me”, 347.
52 Grand Union, 65.
53 Ibid., 64.
54 Ibid., 63.
55 Ibid., 62.
56 Ibid., 64.
57 Ibid.
58 Ibid.
59 Ibid.
60 “The New Sincerity”, 198.
61 Cf. Hoberek, “Cormac McCarthy and the Aesthetics of Exhaustion”, “Literary Genre Fiction”; Lanzendörfer, The Poetics of Genre; Kelly, “Jennifer Egan, New Sincerity”.
62 It is interesting to note how genre fiction as a category pertains almost wholly to the novel form. In light of this, one could make the argument that the short story is itself perceived and articulated as some manner of genre fiction, with no existing history of well-established “genre conventions” that is wholly its own (e.g. short crime fiction, short romance …). This would prevent the short story from allowing that comfort be found in a given author's embracing of the oft-trodden paths of convention, remaining an ever-experimental literary genre – and hence the potential particularness of the examples provided.
63 “The Salon Interview”, 60.
64 Foer, “A Primer”.
65 “The Politics of Postmodernism”, 180.
66 “E Unibus Pluram”, 192.
67 Grand Union, 61.
68 “Post-Hysterics”, 72.
69 Ibid., 73.
70 Grand Union, 186.