Daniel the Writer

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Some of my most recent blogs have taken the form of modern dramatic monologues. See Robert Browning. The writer addresses the reader as though he is speaking about himself, the tone is slightly persuasive and there is often an implied immediacy. Example: You’re at work, bored out of your mind, and you decide to blog about how blogs are defining metamodernism and its literature.

Whereas modernism was about exploring different subjectivities objectively, and postmodernism was all about rejecting the possibility of such a thing, this new movement is all about the individual’s various avatars of subjectivity.

This is the next step in the line of free indirect discourse, where the writer’s narration can be confused with the thoughts of the character. In this style of writing, which most MFA programs encourage as “close third person,” the result is an uncanny intimacy between protagonist and authorial voice. We come to feel as if we have shared the same experiences with the characters. And isn’t that the goal of most excellent writing?

What else about this solidifying metamodernism? Political and emotional value are increasingly conflated with aesthetic value. We’re all curating our experience online to each other. Whoever is most popular, has the most friends, followers, is the coolest, newest. Capitalism pushes us to so that they can sell to us better by knowing what we want. Everyone who has a story is now able to share it. In Egypt they joke that “Nasser was killed by poison, Sadat by a bullet and Mubarak by Facebook.”

We aren’t as concerned with avant garde art and breaking from tradition; instead, the avant garde is made by those who are most familiar with tradition and who give it their own little tweak, and are able to sell it in the global marketplace. Due to social networks crossing from digital to actual realms seamlessly, the line between fiction and nonfiction is just as porous as that between the virtual and the real.