How to Recover Reality. Neo-Romantic Irony in Post-Postmodern American Fiction

Abstract

Even thoughtranscendentalism never ceased to be present in American culture, during the first decade of the twenty-first century,the gaze of artists and theorists turnedto the ideas of the American Renaissancewith a hope that had no place during the reign of postmodern irony.With this in mind, the purpose of this article isto discern the adequacy of Emerson’s philosophy for the recovery of realism through the transcendence of languageand a new use of Romantic irony. The previous analysis will take us to the New Sincerity movement. The writers of the generation that followed in the wake of David Foster Wallace’s actedas a bridge between the postmodern and the post-postmodern narrativeof the beginning of the new millennium. These young writers based their fiction on a critique of institutionalized irony in order to pavethe way for the new post 9/11 novel