Meanings
- artA partial return to modernism, going against prevailing modes of postmodernist irony or cynicism.
1 more example
[Christy Wampole] notes that the New Sincerity has been around since the 1980s, and is a response to "postmodern cynicism, detachment and meta-referentiality." She's right about that, and the examples she cites—David Foster Wallace, Wes Anderson, and Cat Power—are right too. But the New Sincerity failed, she tells us.
2012 November 20, Jonathan D. Fitzgerald, “Sincerity, Not Irony, Is Our Age's Ethos”, in The Atlantic
Origin
Popularized in the 1990s by American author David Foster Wallace.
Full word history & related roots →Cite this entry
New Sincerity. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 4, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/New%20Sincerity
“New Sincerity.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/New%20Sincerity. Accessed November 4, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “New Sincerity,” accessed November 4, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/New%20Sincerity.
Source: New Sincerity on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.