It has been a while since my article “New Sincerity and Commitment to Emotion in Dorothea Lasky’s Poetry” was published in the journal English Studies (available open access here), but I realized I had not written about it here.
The article sets out to understand the phenomenon known as New Sincerity in poetry in connection to the notion of metamodernism and proceeds to make an argument about how Lasky’s poems make use of the human metarepresentational capacity. You can read some of her poems here, although the ones I discuss in the article, from the books Thunderbird (2012) and ROME (2014), appear not to be available online.
Metamodernism has been defined by Robin van den Akker and Timotheus Vermeulen (2017) as “oscillation” between sincerity and irony. While the notion of metamodernism may sound elusive, it is perhaps most simply defined as a curious concept that hovers somewhere between early 20th century modernist seriousness and late 20th century postmodernism that undermined everything through irony. Despite postmodernism’s lingering presence, sincerity’s revival has been discussed already since the 1990s, and in fiction, “New Sincerity” was a “thing” already then. Metamodernism is one strand in the possibly never-ending discussions of what comes after postmodernism. (After all, there was never a single version of postmodernism – why should there be a single thing that follows it?)
As I discuss in the article, the meeting of the two contradictory orientations of sincerity and irony can be illuminated further with reference to metarepresentation, a concept originating in cognitive science which Liza Zunshine (2012) views as essential to how readers understand the “mental states” of literary characters. Lasky’s poems exploit this capacity as they call attention to the power relations between readers and the poems’ speakers and ask readers to reconsider how they attribute mental states while reading a poem. Hers is a poetry that deals with intense emotion and calls on the reader to feel something towards the text, but not necessarily to straightforwardly identify with the speaker’s emotion or to empathize.
While the article focuses on the work of a single poet, it participates in discussions of larger concepts, particularly metamodernism which, in Lasky’s work, appears to hold “both belief and disbelief in view simultaneously”. There may be no going back to a time before irony became all-pervasive, but we might as well try.