Post-postmodern Fiction at the Turn of the Millennium: The Transcendentalist Alternative

Abstract

At the turn of the new millennium, the fiction published by the new generation of writersof the New Sincerity movement, led by David Foster Wallace, questioned the validity of theliterary theories to which the works of the writers of the postmodern old guard conformed.Authors like Dave Eggers, Michael Chabon, Vendela Vida, Nicole Krauss, Jonathan SafranFoer, Mark Z. Danielewski, Zadie Smith or Jonathan Franzen, born in the previous culturalphase, formulated the bases of a conscious movement with the search for the resolution of theconflicts that the vision of the previous generation provoked as foundation stone. The debatethat took place—and which is still going on—in the world of theory and philosophy wasreflected in the works of these authors. Sometimes unconsciously, they captured the desireto recover the interrupted project of modernity—as advocated by Jürgen Habermas—fromthe point where the hiatus began, while preserving the knowledge and social advances gainedfrom the ironic identity of postmodernism. This oscillation, as Tim Vermeulen and Robin vanden Akker call it in their article “Notes on Metamodernism” (2010), can act as a safety valvein the face of a social development that might lead to an authoritarian fanaticism similar tothe one that caused the horrors of World War II.