The postmodern years of plenty, pastiche, and parataxis are over. In fact, if we are to believe the many academics, critics, and pundits whose books and essays describe the decline and demise of the postmodern, they have been over for quite a while now. But if these commentators agree the postmodern condition has been abandoned, they appear less in accord as to what to make of the state it has been abandoned for. In this essay, we will outline the contours of this discourse by looking at recent developments in architecture, art, and film. We will call this discourse, oscillating between a modern enthusiasm and a postmodern irony, metamodernism. We argue that the metamodern is most clearly, yet not exclusively, expressed by the neoromantic turn of late associated with the architecture of Herzog & de Meuron, the installations of Bas Jan Ader, the collages of David Thorpe, the paintings of Kaye Donachie, and the films of Michel Gondry. Timotheus Vermeulen is a teaching fellow in Cultural Studies and Theory at the Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands. He is also currently in the process of completing his AHRC-funded PhD in Film and Television at the University of Reading, UK. He has published on inter-and transmediality, spatiality, contemporary aesthetics, cinema and television, and the work of Jacques Rancière. Robin van den Akker is a Doctoral candidate in the Department of Philosophy at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and a researcher at TNO Informationand Communication Technologies. He is writing a dissertation on the remediation of urban space by mobile media practices. He has published on everyday life and urban space, digital culture and contemporary design, and the work of Henri Lefebvre. Timotheus and Robin are also currently working on an international research project documenting trends and tendencies in current affairs and contemporary aesthetics that can no longer be explained in terms of the postmodern but should be conceived of as metamodern. As part of this project they also co-edit a blog called ''Notes on metamodernism'' (http://mtmdrn.blogs pot.com).
Her central research interests are: multimodal fiction, metamodernism, contemporary autofiction, and fiction on and of the Arab Spring. Timotheus Vermeulen is a scholar and critic. He is associate professor in Media, Culture and Society at the University of Oslo, Norway and Director of the PhD Programme in Media Studies. His research interests include cultural theory, aesthetics, and close textual analysis of film, television and contemporary art. Vermeulen is the author of the monograph Scenes from the Suburbs (2014) and joint editor with Martin Dines of New Suburban Stories (2013). Together with Alison Gibbons and Robin van den Akker he further edited Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect and Depth after Postmodernism (2017). 'Notes on Metamodernism', an essay he co-wrote with van den Akker, was translated and published in book form in Germany as Anmerkungen zur Metamoderne (2016). He is a regular contributor to Frieze. Robin van den Akker is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and Cultural Studies in, and Head of Department for, the Humanities Department at Erasmus University College Rotterdam. Van den Akker has written extensively on contemporary art, culture, aesthetics, and politics. He co-founded the research platform Notes on Metamodernism and is co-editor of Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, and Depth after Postmodernism (2017). REALITY BECKONS: Metamodernist depthiness beyond panfictionalityIt is often argued that postmodernism has been succeeded by a new dominant cultural logic. We conceive of this new logic as metamodernism. Whilst some twenty-first century texts still engage with and utilise postmodernist practices, they put these practices to new use. In this article, we investigate the metamodern usage of the typically postmodernist devices of metatextuality and ontological slippage in two genres: autofiction and true crime documentary. Specifically, we analyse Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being and the Netflix mini-series The Keepers, demonstrating that forms of fictionalisation, metafictionality, and ontological blurring between fiction and reality have been repurposed. We argue that, rather than expand the scope of fiction, overriding reality, the metamodernist repurposing of postmodernist textual strategies generates a kind of 'reality-effect'.
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