Ambivalent sincerity: navigating conflicting allegiances in twentieth-century American fiction and literary criticism (1925-1975)

Thesis

The significance of sincerity has not been adequately understood within the dynamics of Cold War liberal thought. Propounding wholehearted conviction and single-mindedness irrespective of the content of belief, sincerity seems to be at odds with the prevailing ethos of pluralism and bleakness of political outlook. This study, however, argues that sincerity, far from being a virtue antithetical to liberalism’s need for a sense of mobility, creative agency, and its values of tolerance, pluralism, and moderation, was understood by Cold War liberals as a precondition for irony, the recognition of the incommensurability of values, and a thicker conception of civic engagement. This study specifically looks to the accounts of sincerity by immigrant and ethnic minority writers—Alain Locke, Lionel Trilling, Isaiah Berlin, Richard E. Kim, and James Baldwin amongst others—as their divided cultural and political allegiances, and conflicts over identity and group responsibility tended to provoke the most urgent forms of thinking around what sincerity means and entails. These minority writers reconceived sincerity as a complex “working towards,” which was dialogic, involved unremitting self-questioning, and preeminently turned on questions of ambivalence as to how to possess it. In addition to minoritarian explorations of sincerity, this study examines the concept as inflected by quite divergent philosophical interests during the midcentury, namely pragmatism, existentialism, value theory, ordinary language philosophy, and the longer humanist tradition associated with Matthew Arnold among others. Although there might presently be considerable skepticism about the usefulness of adhering to frameworks of sincerity (as notions of artificiality or gender as performativity are no longer radical but tacitly accepted claims), the activity of searching, defining, or contesting what is truly one’s voice, desire, hope, or self under neoliberal conditions has somehow never been lost from view.

Authors: Kim, H

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-2a9xjo5xd
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English