Word.ws English Dictionary

New Sincerity

New Sincerity proper noun: a partial return to modernism, going against prevailing modes of postmodernist irony or cynicism.

Proper noun

the New Sincerity

  1. A partial return to modernism, going against prevailing modes of postmodernist irony or cynicism.
    • [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...2012 November 20, Jonathan D. Fitzgerald, “Sincerity, Not Irony, Is Our Age's Ethos”, in The Atlantic

Origin of New Sincerity

Popularized in the 1990s by American author David Foster Wallace.

Questions about New Sincerity

What does New Sincerity mean?
New Sincerity means a partial return to modernism, going against prevailing modes of postmodernist irony or cynicism.
What part of speech is New Sincerity?
New Sincerity is a proper noun.

Words near New Sincerity in the dictionary

  1. new shooter
  2. New Shoreham
  3. New Siberian Islands
  4. New Silksworth
  5. new silver
  6. New Sincerity
  7. new skool
  8. New Smyrna Beach
  9. New Society Village
  10. New Song
  11. New Soup

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: New Sincerity (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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