New Sincerity and the Literary Self-Portrait: A Case Study Across Modernism, Postmodernism and Beyond

In this paper I take two recent cases of literary self-portraits to argue that both function as artistic manifestations of the 1990’s concept of New Sincerity, which was proposed by David Foster Wallace in “E Unibus Pluram” (1993), and theorized by Adam Kelly in 2010. Such self-portraits are Edouard Levé's Autoportrait (2005) and Saúl Montaño's Autorretrato (2017). Moreover, I analyze if these self-portraits contextualize New Sincerity in their respective local Zeitgeists (France and Bolivia, respectively). Additionally, I contrast the self-portraits written by Levé and Montaño with other two written in verse and belonging to the paradigm of Modernism in the twentieth century: one belonging to Pablo Neruda and the other, to Nichita Stănescu. By this comparison, I argue that New Sincerity might be shaping contemporary self-portraits with new features that differ from the Modernist tendency to fulfill contemporary local needs.