Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, and Depth after Postmodernism (Radical Cultural Studies) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1783489618 ISBN 13: 9781783489619

Verlag: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, Depth brings together many of the most influential voices in the scholarly and critical debate about post-postmodernism and twenty-first century aesthetics, arts and culture. By relating cutting-edge analyses of contemporary literature, the visual arts and film and television to recent social, technological and economic developments, the volume provides both a map and an itinerary of today's metamodern cultural landscape. As its organising principle, the book takes Fredric Jameson's canonical arguments about the waning of historicity, affect and depth in the postmodern culture of western capitalist societies in the twentieth century, and re-evaluates and reconceptualises these notions in a twenty-first century context. In doing so, it shows that the contemporary moment should be regarded as a transitional period from the postmodern and into the metamodern cultural moment.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Robin van den Akker is Lecturer in Continental Philosophy and Cultural Studies at Erasmus University College Rotterdam.

Alison Gibbons is Reader in Contemporary Stylistics at Sheffield Hallam University.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Metamodernism

Historicity, Affect, and Depth After Postmodernism

By Robin van den Akker, Alison Gibbons, Timotheus Vermeulen

Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.

Copyright © 2017 Robin van den Akker, Alison Gibbons and Timotheus Vermeulen
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78348-961-9

Contents

List of Figures and Table, ix, 
Acknowledgements, xi, 
1 Periodising the 2000s, or, the Emergence of Metamodernism Robin van den Akker and Timotheus Vermeulen, 1, 
SECTION I: HISTORICITY, 
i. Metamodern Historicity Robin van den Akker, 21, 
2 The Metamodern, the Quirky and Film Criticism James MacDowell, 25, 
3 Toni Morrison's Beloved and the Rise of Historioplastic Metafiction Josh Toth, 41, 
4 Super-Hybridity: Non-Simultaneity, Myth-Making and Multipolar Conflict Jörg Heiser, 55, 
5 The Cosmic Artisan: Mannerist Virtuosity and Contemporary Crafts Sjoerd van Tuinen, 69, 
SECTION II: AFFECT, 
ii. Metamodern Affect Alison Gibbons, 83, 
6 Four Faces of Postirony Lee Konstantinou, 87, 
7 Radical Defenselessness: A New Sense of Self in the Work of David Foster Wallace Nicoline Timmer, 103, 
8 Contemporary Autofiction and Metamodern Affect Alison Gibbons, 117, 
9 The Joke That Wasn't Funny Anymore: Reflections on the Metamodern Sitcom, 131, 
SECTION III: DEPTH, 
iii. Metamodern Depth, or 'Depthiness' Timotheus Vermeulen, 147, 
10 Reconstructing Depth: Authentic Fiction and Responsibility Irmtraud Huber and Wolfgang Funk, 151, 
11 Between Truth, Sincerity and Satire: Post-Truth Politics and the Rhetoric of Authenticity Sam Browse, 167, 
12 Notes on Performatist Photography: Experiencing Beauty and Transcendence after Postmodernism Raoul Eshelman, 183, 
EPILOGUE, 201, 
13 Thoughts on Writing about Art after Postmodernism James Elkins, 203, 
References, 211, 
Index, 229, 
About the Contributors, 241, 

CHAPTER 1

Periodising the 2000s, or, the Emergence of Metamodernism

Robin van den Akker and Timotheus Vermeulen

Thinking at once negatively and positively about it is a beginning, but what we need is a new vocabulary. The languages that have been useful in talking about culture and politics in the past don't really seem adequate to this historical moment. (Jameson on postmodernism quoted in Stephanson 1988, 12–13)

In 1989, the social theorist Francis Fukuyama wrote a controversial article in the National Interest under the title 'The End of History?' In the article, he argued that with the pending demise of the communist empire, History with a capital H – that is, not simply the chronology of time passing, but the chronicle of mankind's evolutionary process – had ended. With the 'unabashed victory of liberal democracy', he suggested in his subsequent book The End of History and the Last Man (1992, xii):

mankind had achieved a form of society that satisfied its deepest and most fundamental longings. ... This did not mean that the natural cycle of birth, life, and death would end, that important events would no longer happen, or that newspapers reporting them would cease to be published. It meant, rather, that there would be no further progress in the development of underlying principles and institutions, because all of the really big questions had been settled.

Some twenty years later, in 2012, Fukuyama wrote another article broaching the subject of History. Published in Foreign Affairs, it was entitled 'The Future of History'. Here, Fukuyama wrote that calling the End of History may, in retrospect, have been just a bit premature, for the alleged 'unabashed victory of liberal democracy', he conceded, had since come under some scrutiny. Democratic governments all over the world increasingly failed to deliver on its promises: most national economies have not proliferated but have stagnated or gone into long-term recessions; political extremism – left and right, liberal and conservative, secular and religious – is on the rise; the middle classes, the traditional stronghold of twentieth-century liberal democracy, are shrinking; and social media have problematised twentieth-century notions of freedom of speech and the free press. In addition, a serious contender for geopolitical hegemony has emerged: China's state-regulated market system. There are, in other words, plenty of 'big questions' left to answer.

Since the turn of the millennium, it has become increasingly commonplace to declare that History has not halted and has not come to a standstill. Various authors from across the political spectrum have, for instance, written about the remarkable 'return' (Kagan 2008), 'revenge' (Milne 2012) or 'rebirth' (Badiou 2012) of History after the End of History. These authors all agree, as a premise, that History has been rebooted by recent world historical crises of an ecological, economic or (geo-)political nature. Arquilla perhaps most aptly summarises the current historical moment with his notion of a 'bend of History' (2011). A bending of History may simultaneously imply forcing History into a different direction or shape as well as causing History to deflect from the more or less straight line of teleological narrative. It also captures the increasing awareness across culture that there is something at stake, yet we are still very much unsure what this something – hidden around the bend, as it were – might be (and we will only really know in hindsight).

To an extent, this book is about the bend of History and its associated 'senses of a bend' that have come to define contemporary cultural production and political discourse. Our use of the phrase 'senses of a bend' is, of course, both a wink and a homage to Fredric Jameson's canonical essay 'Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism' in which he tried to come to terms with all of the – by then very dominant – 'senses of the end of this or that' (1991 [1984], 1) in postmodern art, culture and politics. For Jameson, the main casualties of all of these postmodern 'senses of the end' might have very well been History and the historical imagination.

Now that History appears to have, once more, been kick-started, the postmodern vernacular has proven increasingly inapt and inept in coming to terms with our changed social situation. This goes for discussions of History as much as it goes for debates about the arts. We can think, here, of the waning of a host of different postmodern impulses, which nonetheless share some kind of family resemblance (Jameson's 'senses of the end', if you will): pop art and deconstructive conceptual art (from Warhol to Hirst, by way of Koons); punk, new wave and grunge's cynicism in popular music; disaffected minimalism in cinema; spectacular formalism in architecture; metafictional irony in literature, as well as the whole emphasis on a dehumanising cyberspace in science fictions of all kinds. Moreover, since the turn of the millennium, we have seen the emergence of various 'new', often overlapping, aesthetic phenomena such as the New Romanticism in the arts (Vermeulen and van den Akker 2010), the New Mannerism in crafts (van Tuinen, this volume), the New Aesthetic in design (Sterling 2012), the New Sincerity in literature (Konstantinou 2009, 2016a), the New Weird or Nu-Folk in music (Poecke 2014), Quirky Cinema and Quality Television (MacDowell 2012; Vermeulen and Rustad 2013), as well as the discovery of a new terrain for architecture (Allen and McQuade 2011), each of them characterised by an attempt to...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1783489618
• ISBN 13: 9781783489619
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 260
• Herausgeber: Van Den Akker Robin
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland