My dissertation, Afterlives of Modernism: Metamodern Forms in Contemporary Fiction, treats modernist writers as solenoids for their twenty-first century descendants. In four chapters, I read works by D.H. Lawrence and Rachel Cusk, Samuel Beckett and J.M. Coetzee, V.S. Naipaul and Zadie Smith, and James Joyce and Ali Smith. Each takes a different thematic as I argue that the contemporary novel remains more relevant than ever, even as it encourages us to wrestle with twentieth century formal developments.
By the late 1990s, postmodernism had been theorized, the end of history proclaimed, and the turn of the millennium was anxiously anticipated. How would art respond to such a moment? Was it conceivable that postmodernism would linger into the twenty-first century? Perhaps most important, could artists and critics decide upon the name of a future aesthetic period less unwieldy than post-postmodernism?
A text like David Foster Wallace’s “E Unibus Pluram” (1993) proposes that a writing for the new millennium could be rejuvenated through sincerity, affect, relationality and the productive interplay of opposing principles. By the start of the twenty-first century young writers such as Zadie Smith in White Teeth offered new visions of hybridity and optimism. Dave Eggers broke the fourth wall in his ironically-sincerely-titled A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Throughout the ‘90s, and culminating in his 2001 intermedial novel Austerlitz, W.G. Sebald blended fictionality and non-fictionality in works that interrogated memory and meaning. Rather than repudiate postmodernism or modernism, these texts embraced authenticity, values, and the perspectivism often associated with the early twentieth century, as well as the often skeptical yet playful metafictive forms and addresses of the later twentieth century. In hindsight, the incorporation of specific elements of modernism and postmodernism has led to how critics theorize the oscillatory principles of our current aesthetic.
The periodic successor of Postmodernism has been and continues to be called by various names, yet the term “Metamodernism” has achieved broad application to cultural and aesthetic values. By incorporating the Modernist belief that aesthetic values matter, that concepts like truth and beauty can and do exist, and combining them with a Postmodern skepticism about the likelihood for stabilizing such concepts, and a self-awareness about how to do so, Metamodernism tries to take the best of the twentieth century aesthetics while discarding its worst–Modernism’s Eurocentrism, and teleological linearity, and Postmodernism’s eddying into nihilism. There remains debate about the limits, characteristics and terms of this epochal shift, but it is clear that our aesthetic moment is different from the Postmodernist and Modernist eras.
My work takes specific novels and novelists as the subjects for such an application of Metamodern theory, incorporating recent philosophy to show how contemporary works of literature reflect the values of an era distinct from the twentieth century.
Daniel the Writer 