A growing frustration with “spin doctors,” doublespeak, and outright lying by public officials has resulted in a deep public cynicism regarding politics today. It has also led many voters to seek out politicians who engage in “straight talk,” out of a hope that sincerity signifies a dedication to the truth. While this is an understandable reaction to the degradation of public discourse inflicted by political hype, Elizabeth Markovits argues that the search for sincerity in the public arena actually constitutes a dangerous distraction from more important concerns, including factual truth and the ethical import of political statements. Her argument takes her back to an examination of the Greek notion of parrhesia (frank speech), and she draws from her study of the Platonic dialogues a nuanced understanding of this ancient analogue of “straight talk.” She shows Plato to have an appreciation for rhetoric rather than a desire to purge it from public life, providing insights into the ways it can contribute to a fruitful form of deliberative democracy today.

This edited volume examines concepts of sincerity in politics and international relations in order to discuss what we should expect of politicians, within what parameters they should work, and how their decisions and actions could be made consistent with morality. The volume features an international cast of authors who specialize in the topic of sincerity in politics and international relations. Looking at how sincerity bears on political actions, practices, and institutions at national and international level, the introduction serves to place the chapters in the context of ongoing contemporary debates on sincerity in politics and international theory. Each chapter focuses on a contemporary issue in politics and international relations, including corruption, public hypocrisy, cynicism, trust, security, policy formulation and decision-making, political apology, public reason, political dissimulation, denial and self-deception, and will argue against the background of a Kantian view of sincerity as unconditional. Offering a significant comprehensive outlook on the practical limits of sincerity in political affairs, this work will be of great interest to both students and scholars.

It is now beyond question that contemporary American politics is highly contentious and divided. We argue that deep disagreement over the idea of personal responsibility lies at the heart of this polarization. Republicans believe that individuals succeed or fail based on their own talents and efforts, while Democrats see a society where many individuals lack opportunity and are adversely affected by forces they cannot control. This fundamental difference drives American political conflict.

The essays in this volume demonstrate how the performance of sincerity is culturally specific and is enacted in different ways in different media and disciplines, including law and the arts.

The study of contemporary fiction is a fascinating yet challenging one. Contemporary fiction has immediate relevance to popular culture, the news, scholarly organizations, and education – where it is found on the syllabus in schools and universities – but it also offers challenges. What is ‘contemporary’? How do we track cultural shifts and changes? The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Literary Fiction takes on this challenge, mapping key literary trends from the year 2000 onwards, as the landscape of our century continues to take shape around us. A significant and central intervention into contemporary literature, this Companion offers essential coverage of writers who have risen to prominence since then, such as Hari Kunzru, Jennifer Egan, David Mitchell, Jonathan Lethem, Ali Smith, A. L. Kennedy, Hilary Mantel, Marilynne Robinson, and Colson Whitehead. Thirty-eight essays by leading and emerging international scholars cover topics such as: • Identity, including race, sexuality, class, and religion in the twenty-first century; • The impact of technology, terrorism, activism, and the global economy on the modern world and modern literature; • The form and format of twenty-first century literary fiction, including analysis of established genres such as the pastoral, graphic novels, and comedic writing, and how these have been adapted in recent years. Accessible to experts, students, and general readers, The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Literary Fiction provides a map of the critical issues central to the discipline, as well as uncovering new perspectives and new directions for the development of the field. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the past, present, and future of contemporary literature.

Trilling is concerned with the process by which the arduous enterprise of sincerity, of being true to one’s self, came to occupy a place of supreme importance in the moral life—and the further shift which finds that place now usurped by the darker and still more strenuous modern ideal of authenticity.

Unprecedented social change in China has intensified the contradictions faced by ordinary people. In everyday life, people find themselves caught between official and popular discourses, encounter radically different representations of China's past and its future, and draw on widely diverse moral frameworks. This volume explores irony and cynicism as part of the social life of local communities in China, and specifically in relation to the contemporary Chinese state. It collects ethnographies of irony and cynicism in social action, written by a group of anthropologists who specialise in China. They use the lenses of irony and cynicism - broadly defined to include resignation, resistance, humour, ambiguity and dialogue - to look anew at the social, political and moral contradictions faced by Chinese people. The various contributions are concerned with both the interpretation of intentions in everyday social action and discourse, and the broader theoretical consequences of such interpretations for an understanding of the Chinese state. As a study of irony and cynicism in modern China and their implications on the social and political aspects of everyday life, this book will be of huge interest to students and scholars of social and cultural anthropology, Chinese culture and society, and Chinese politics.

“A serious and engaging cultural history painted on an admirably large canvas.”—Laura Kipnis, New York Times Book Review What do John Calvin, Sarah Palin, Jean-Jacques Rosseau, and Bon Iver have in common? A preoccupation with sincerity. With deep historical perspective and a brilliant contemporary spin, R. Jay Magill Jr. tells the beguiling tale of sincerity’s theological past, its current emotional resonance, and the deep impact it has had on the Western soul. At a time when politicians are scrutinized less for the truth of what they say than for how much they really mean it, Sincerity provides a wide-ranging examination of a moral ideal that remains a strange magnetic north in our secular moral compass.

In this ground-breaking account of the political economy and cultural meaning of blood in contemporary India, Jacob Copeman and Dwaipayan Banerjee examine how the giving and receiving of blood has shaped social and political life. Hematologies traces how the substance congeals political ideologies, biomedical rationalities, and activist practices. Using examples from anti-colonial appeals to blood sacrifice as a political philosophy to contemporary portraits of political leaders drawn with blood, from the use of the substance by Bhopali children as a material of activism to biomedical anxieties and aporias about the excess and lack of donation, Hematologies broaches how political life in India has been shaped through the use of blood and through contestations about blood. As such, the authors offer new entryways into thinking about politics and economy through a "bloodscape of difference": different sovereignties; different proportionalities; and different temporalities. These entryways allow the authors to explore the relation between blood's utopic flows and political clottings as it moves through time and space, conjuring new kinds of social collectivities while reanimating older forms, and always in a reflexive relation to norms that guide its proper flow.

A compelling study of new sincerity as a powerful cultural practice, born in perestroika-era Russia, and how it interconnects with global social and media flows The global cultural practice of a new sincerity in literature, media, art, design, fashion, film, and architecture grew steadily in the wake of the Soviet collapse. Cultural historian Ellen Rutten traces the rise and proliferation of a new rhetoric of sincere social expression characterized by complex blends of unabashed honesty, playfulness, and irony. Insightful and thought provoking, Rutten s masterful study of a sweeping cultural trend with roots in late Soviet Russia addresses postsocialist, postmodern, and postdigital questions of selfhood. The author explores how and why a uniquely Russian artistic and social philosophy was shaped by cultural memory, commodification, and mediatization, and how, under Putin, new sincerity talk merges with transnational pleas to revive sincerity. This essential study stands squarely at the intersection of the history of emotions, media studies, and post-Soviet studies to shed light on a new cultural reality one that is profoundly affecting creative thought, artistic expression, and lifestyle virtually everywhere.