Jesus Bolano-Quintero

This article traces Paul Auster's shift in sensibility after the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center. While his earlier novels where paradigmatic of postmodern self-referentiality, several critics have argued that his post-9/11 production turned towards realism. This might be interpreted as subsidiary evidence in favor of the polemic debate around the death of postmodernism. However, the aim of this article is to outline the transformation of the writer and offer explanations as to why that change in sensibility does not respond to a divestiture of postmodernism, but to an intensification of it. I trace Auster's alternative to postmodern relativism, that is, transcendentalism, to arrive at the conclusion that his stance towards it is the same in his later novels.

At the turn of the millennium, many theorists questioned the survival of postmodernism and, although it is true that their statements were not supported by a general consensus, the new century brought with it an intense debate on the subject. With this in mind, the aim of this article is to map out the taxonomy of the alternatives to postmodernism proposed by several theorists during the first decade of the twenty-first century in order to understand their nature. This article analyses an extensive corpus of theories, to arrive at the conclusion that this period was an interstitial moment of change whose direction seemed to be heading towards the recovery of a muchnuanced unfinished project of modernity, as advocated by Jürgen Habermas. This attempt at debunking postmodern relativism was thwarted by the social dissatisfaction generated by the bank bailout of 2008 and the ulterior intensification of neoliberalism. However, the subsequent attempts to define the zeitgeist of this cultural phase that followed postmodernism started to dwindle. The desired recovery of this unfinished project responds to a need for univocity that, during the 2010s, leads to a hyper-neoliberalism sponsored by populism and constructed on a kind of reactionary post-truth.

Even though transcendentalism never ceased to be present in American culture, during the first decade of the twenty-first century, the gaze of artists and theorists turned to the ideas of the American Renaissance with a hope that had no place during the reign of postmodern irony. With this in mind, the purpose of this article is to discern the adequacy of Emerson’s philosophy for the recovery of realism through the transcendence of language and 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 acted as a bridge between the postmodern and the post-postmodern narrative of the beginning of the new millennium. These young writers based their fiction on a critique of institutionalized irony in order to pave the way for the new post 9/11 novel.

At the turn of the millennium, the young writers of the New Sincerity movement tried to create a new realist literature by getting rid of the destructive power of postmodern irony. The consecrated writers of the old postmodern guard, whose Weltanschauung was conformed to the style and the relativistic reality-processing modes of the previous paradigm, saw this change with scepticism. Nevertheless, there was a change in their sensibility when approaching certain themes. This article analyses Paul Auster’s Sunset Park as paradigmatic example of that shift in order to shed some light on its nature.

The point of departure for this article is the much-debated death of postmodernism, heralded by influential experts on the subject such as Linda Hutcheon or Ihab Hassan at the beginning of the new millennium. Although the academic community as a whole has not agreed with this fact, there was an intense debate during the first years of the twenty-first century that was evidence of a change of attitude towards this cultural phase. With this in mind, the aim of this study is to provide a theoretical framework for the change in order to understand its nature. Analysing the theories developed by Thomas S. Kuhn on paradigm shifts in the field of science and applying them to the context of critical theory at the beginning of the millennium serves to challenge the very idea of postmodernism as a paradigm in the terms developed in Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

By analysing Dave Eggers's autofictional work A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, this article attempts to reveal the role of this author in the post-postmodern narrative of the turn of the millennium. Following in the wake of David Foster Wallace, Eggers's solution to overcome the problems created by postmodernism is a kind of writing based on honesty. Through a rebirth of the author, the objective of Eggers's New Sincerity is the democratization of narrative in order to create a sensibility network aimed at ending the solipsism brought about by postmodern linguistic relativism. However, this new sensibility is reminiscent of pre-postmodern fundamentalism. The use of meta-metafiction based on the use of neo-Romantic irony enables Eggers to create an escape valve that allows for the creation of a metamodern oscillation-as described by Tim Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker.

Paul Auster is one of the most widely studied postmodern authors and his novels have been extensively used as paradigmatic examples of the fiction of this movement. In light of the recent theoretical debate about the passing of postmodernism, it seems fundamental to explore the way in which Auster conceives the nature of this paradigm, the problems it arises and their possible solutions. The aim of this article is to analyse two recurring types of characters from the Austerian universe that represent two great sources of influence on the novelist: Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy and the ideas from
American transcendentalism.

This article responds to the debate in the field of literary theory around the nature of post-postmodern American novels. While some authors claimed at the turn of the millennium that the novel was dead, a new generation of American writers were responsible for a new engagement with the gen-re on the part of the public. With this in mind, this study seeks to shed light on the nature of the literature written by young novelists seeking to distance themselves from the dead end of post-modernism. Our premise is that during the crisis that brings about a rethinking of the concept of postmodernity, the young American authors turned their gaze towards ideas from American tran-scendentalism as a tool to recover the unfinished Project of modernity.

Starting with an analysis of the significance of the French New Wave for postmodern cinema, this essay sets out to make a study of Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia (1999) as the film that marks the beginning of what could be considered a paradigm shift in American cinema at the end of the 20th century. Building from the much-debated passing of postmodernism, this study focuses on several key postmodern aspects that take a different slant in this movie. The film points out the value of aspects that had lost their meaning within the fiction typical of postmodernism-such as the absence of causality; sincere honesty as opposed to destructive irony; or the loss of faith in Lyotardian meta-narratives. We shall look at the nature of the paradigm shift to link it to the desire to overcome postmodern values through a recovery of Romantic ideas.

David Foster Wallace's "E Unibus Pluram" is an account of the prevalence of destructive irony at the end of the twentieth century. Trying to break free from the solipsism brought about by postmodern relativism, Wallace embraced sincerity as the cornerstone of the zeitgeist of the new millennium. This article offers an analysis of two salient sources of influence that could be considered as inspiration for Wallace's alternative to postmodern irony: American transcendentalism and Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. It does so with the intention of furthering the understanding of the cultural significance of the work of the author for the generation of writers that followed in his wake, and to demonstrate how the recovery of Romantic ideals may be the key to map out the nature of the paradigm shift to post-postmodernism. Keywords: David Foster Wallace, postmodernism, post-postmodernism, New Sincerity.

This article analyses Alexander Payne's film Nebraska from the perspective of the paradigm shift produced after the much-debated passing of postmodernism, announced by theorists such as Ihab Hassan or Linda Hutcheon. We shall examine how the lack of grand narratives makes it almost impossible to give structured meanings to the concept of reality. Payne's project can be viewed as both an allegorical and a physical journey that takes the character to no specific destination in his search to make amends with the harsh reality that, ultimately, spells the end of the American Dream.

Many scholars deem the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers as the events that mark the demise of postmodernism. The dream is over and the age of irony has to make way for the era of earnestness. Suddenly, the banality of postmodern games does not fit inside the frame of the sense of loss of the American society. American authors must account for a new reality. In fact, they need to start striving towards the creation of that new reality to be able to manage the void of the era post 9/11. Many writers follow the path opened by David Foster Wallace in the previous decade in order to find a voice to speak about the sense of trauma and loss. Wallace uses honesty and sincerity to cope with the pervasive and destructive postmodern irony and he borrows many of the ideas from the American transcendentalist movement. In this light, our position is that many of the novels dealing with the loss and trauma of the era post 9/11 inherit that sincerity from Wallace and rely in American transcendentalism to be able to understand the new American reality. It is for this reason that we feel it fruitful to provide a brief  analysis of Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Extremely Loud & Incredibly close (2005) to exemplify this theory.

After the passing of postmodernism, many authors start proposing alternatives for a new paradigm with the hope of eliminating the feelings of solipsism and nihilism produced by years of metafictional experimentation. In the new post-9/11 era, the lack of grand narratives makes it almost impossible to give a structured meaning to the concept of reality and the place that the individual takes in it. In this context, dealing with these feelings of nihilism and solipsism, creates the perfect breeding ground for the wild theoretical experimentation that takes place during the first decade of the new millennium. A great number of the new proposals—like Raoul Eshelman’s “performatism”, Nicolas Bourriaud’s “altermodernity”, Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin Van den Akker’s “metamodernism” or Gilles Lipovetsky’s “hypermodernity”—try to recover the lost structure of reality by recuperating, in one way or another, the old values of the unfinished project of modernity (some of them in a more explicit way than others). In a world where the grand narratives that reassured the modern individual and the perception of reality no longer have a place, the only solution to get rid of the dire consequences of postmodernism is faith. Even if there is not a project to believe in, people need to have something to hold on to. The model on which this new faith is based is the Kantian “as-if” thinking. This idea is developed by Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin Van den Akker in their influential article “Notes on Metamodernism”, where they analyse the end of postmodernism and the new structure of feeling. Given its relevance for contemporary theory, I consider that this concept and its ramifications needs to be further studied. With this in mind, in this paper I would like to contribute to the explanation of this change of paradigm through the analysis of Alexander Payne’s film Nebraska. The director recreates the feelings of an individual who tries to get rid of his solipsism and nihilism by constructing a grand narrative of his own in which he can believe. This metanarrative, based on the Kantian “as-if” thinking, will provide him with a new project that will give a structure to a reality that no longer makes sense. The project is an allegorical and an actual journey that will take the characters to no specific destination. This metanarrative, based on the Kantian “as-if” thinking, will provide him with a new structure to cope with the harsh reality of the end of the American Dream.

Many scholars consider the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers as the events that mark the demise of postmodernism. The dream is over. The age of irony makes way for the era of earnestness. Suddenly, the banality of postmodern games does not fit inside the frame of the sense of loss of the American society. American authors must account for a new reality. In fact, they have to start creating that new reality to be able to manage the void of the era post 9/11. Many writers follow the path opened by David Foster Wallace in the previous decade in order to find a voice to speak about the sense of trauma and loss. Wallace uses honesty and sincerity to cope with the pervasive and destructive postmodern irony, and he borrows many of the ideas from the American transcendentalist movement. We argue here that many of the novels dealing with the loss and trauma of the era post 9/11 inherit that sincerity from Wallace and rely in American transcendentalism to be able to understand the new American reality. We will study Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2005) to exemplify this theory.

English:

The post 11/9 cultural context raises doubt about the survival of postmodernism. Both the profuse new nomenclature and the theories that attempt to explain what is happening in the world of theory and culture show that there is a shift towards values that had been forgotten after the loss of faith in meta-narratives, as Jean-François Lyotard explained in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979).

After applying the “paradigm shift” model, developed by Thomas Kuhn, to the subject of this study, we reached the conclusion that, even when the necessary elements for a revolution are there —such as those presented in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)—, the death of postmodernism does not give rise to a paradigm shift perfectly adjusted to the Kuhnian notion of the term. Instead of that, it is giving way to a desire to recover the unfinished project of modernity, as advocated by Jürgen Habermas.

In the absence of a revolution during the change from modernism to the next phase —but rather a distortion—, because of the loss of faith toward meta-narratives, one could say that postmodernism has been a post-paradigmatic cultural phase in which an inability to respond to the problems raised by that mistrust developed.

The aim of this study is to contribute to the research on the nature of the paradigm shift produced after the discussed death of postmodernism through the analysis of the works of Paul Auster and Dave Eggers as representatives of two different generations of authors belonging to different cultural phases. This work aims to establish the roots of the change and the implications that it can have on culture and society. It also aims to explain how this phenomenon occurs through the resurgence of ideas coming from the philosophy of the nineteenth century, and in particular from American transcendentalism.

Spanish:
El marco cultural post 11-S levanta dudas sobre la pervivencia del postmodernismo. Tanto la profusa nomenclatura de nuevo cuño como las teorías que pretenden explicar lo que está ocurriendo en el mundo de la teoría y la cultura ponen de relieve que se está dando un giro hacia valores que habían sido olvidados tras la pérdida de fe en los metarrelatos, tal como lo explicó Lyotard en La condición postmoderna: informe sobre el saber (1979).

Al aplicar el esquema desarrollado por Thomas Kuhn al objeto de este estudio, se llega a la conclusión de que, aunque se den los elementos para una revolución como las que se plantean en su obra La estructura de las revoluciones científicas (1962), la muerte del postmodernismo no da lugar a un cambio de paradigma totalmente ajustado a la noción kuhniana del término, sino que está dando paso a un deseo de recuperar el proyecto inacabado de la modernidad preconizado por Jürgen Habermas.

Al no haberse dado una revolución durante el cambio del modernismo a la siguiente fase, sino más bien una distorsión, a causa de la desconfianza hacia los metarrelatos, se podría decir que la situación postmoderna ha sido un momento postparadigmático en el que, debido en gran medida al relativismo, se desarrolló una incapacidad para dar respuestas a los problemas planteados a raíz de dicha desconfianza.

El objetivo de esta tesis es contribuir a la investigación sobre la naturaleza del cambio de paradigma producido tras la discutida muerte del postmodernismo a través del análisis de la obra de Paul Auster y Dave Eggers como representantes de dos generaciones de autores pertenecientes a fases culturales diferentes. Se pretende establecer cuáles son las raíces del cambio y las implicaciones que estas pueden tener en la cultura y sociedad, y explicar cómo dicho fenómeno se da a través de la revalorización de ideas procedentes de la filosofía del siglo XIX, y en particular del transcendentalismo americano encabezado por Ralph Waldo Emerson.