DRAFT Chapter Five Sincerity, Sharing, and Authorial Discourses on the Fiction/Nonfiction Distinction The Case of Dave Eggers’s You Shall Know Our Velocity Virginia Pignagnoli [5.4] Mainly concerned with a longing for sincerity, much twenty-first century literature problematizes an ontological distinction between fiction and non- fiction. Nevertheless, how to theoretically approach such genre-blending nar- ratives and the strategies employed by contemporary authors to achieve truthful and earnest communication are still open questions. This essay of- fers, through the analysis of a paradigmatic case, Dave Eggers’s You Shall Know Our Velocity (2003, 2004), 1 some possible answers for contemporary narratives interested in a “dialectic of sincerity” (Kelly 2014) and puts them in relation to generic distinctions. As I will show, the fiction/nonfiction dis- course underlying You Shall Know Our Velocity reveals a strategy of sharing the author’s creative process of writing in order to achieve sincerity. [5.5] The first section introduces the narrative’s thematic components and com- municative purposes to show how they relate to so-called post-postmodern literature. In the second section, I analyze Eggers’s use of a paratextual device to express his preoccupations with truthful communication in fictional works. I will also suggest that a recent theory of fictionality (Nielsen, Phelan, Walsh 2015a, 2015b) may be helpful to re-frame Eggers’s novel by account- ing for its rhetorical strategies (instead of focusing on its ontological quality). The third section provides further examples of contemporary literary narra- tives employing a sharing strategy in order to create a communal knowledge