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'.
