Metamodernism

Question 1

How does Luke Turner characterise metamodernism in his 2011 ‘The Metamodernist Manifesto’?

Answer 1

“oscillation to be the natural order of the world”

“a romantic reaction to our crisis-ridden moment”

“‘structure of feeling’ that oscillates between modernism and postmodernism”

Question 2

What is it responding to culturally?

Answer 2

• to recent global events such as climate change, the financial crisis, political instability, and the digital revolution

Question 3

How does it react against postmodernity?

Answer 3

• the postmodern culture of relativism, irony, and pastiche is over
• replaced by apost-ideological condition that stresses engagement, affect, and storytelling

Question 4

What is the significance of ‘meta’?

Answer 4

• refers toPlato’smetaxy, which denotes amovement between opposite poles as well as beyond them
• metaxy defined inPlato’s‘Symposium’ via the character of the priestessDiotimaas the “in-between” or “middle ground”
• metamodernism is almost a plea for this type of metaxy

Question 5

How does it interact with metanarratives?

Answer 5

• for themetamodern generation - grand narrativesare as necessary as they are problematic, hope is not simply something to distrust, love not necessarily something to be ridiculed

Question 6

Does it embrace or reject deconstruction, parataxis and pastiche?

Answer 6

• new generations of artists increasingly abandon the aesthetic precepts of deconstruction, parataxis, and pastiche in favour ofaesthethicalnotions of reconstruction, myth, and metaxis

Question 7

Why do neither modern discourses or postmodern discourses work?

Answer 7

• current modernity can no longer be characterised by either the modern discourse of the universal gaze of the white, western male or its postmodern deconstruction along the heterogeneous lines of race, gender, class, and locality

Question 8

Where does the movement place postmodern irony and modern enthusiasm?

Answer 8

• modern enthusiasm (encompassing everything from utopism to the unconditional belief in Reason)
  VS
• postmodern irony (encompassing nihilism, sarcasm, and the distrust and deconstruction of grand narratives, the singular and the truth)

Question 9

How is the metamodernist structure of feeling inspired by both modernism and postmodernism?

Answer 9

• inspired by a modern naïveté yet informed by postmodern skepticism
• the metamodern discourse consciously commits itself to an impossible possibility

Question 10

What is the relationship between metamodernism and neo-romanticism?

Answer 10

metamodernism appears to find its clearest expression in an emergent neo-romantic sensibility

Question 11

Why does metamodernism appear to find its clearest expression in an emergent neo-romantic sensibility?

Answer 11

Romanticism is about the attempt to turn the finite into the infinite, while recognising that it can never be realised
- neo-romanticism: it has been applied to writers, painters, and composers who rejected, abandoned, or opposed realism, naturalism, or avant-garde modernism at various points in time from about 1840 down to the present

Question 12

How has the Romantic attitude returned?

Answer 12

• use of tropes of mysticism, estrangement, and alienation

Question 13

How does performance art fit into metamodernism?

Answer 13

• Shia LaBeoufreached out to Turner in early 2014 after reading the text, with the trio embarking on a series of metamodern performance projects
• exploring connection, empathy, and community across digital and physical platforms

Question 14

How does Philip Damico characterise the aim of metamodernism?

Answer 14

• to dissolve the alienation from society that many of us suffer from on a daily basis as a result of these postmodern values

Question 15

Is metamodernism a rejection of postmodernist cynicism?

Answer 15

• metamodernism is not a rejection of postmodern moral relativism and cynicism but a progression from it
  we have, as a result of postmodernism, been convinced that humanity is in decline

Question 16

Why does the metamodernist want to live as if positive change and progress can be achieved?

Answer 16

• can never hurt to have this belief but may actually be helpful
• such a mindset staves off existential despair
• if we collectively take the attitude that progress can be achieved - society will benefit
• wants to bring ethical hierarchies back into play

Question 17

How might we characterise the metamodernist structure of feeling?

Answer 17

• the metamodern structure of feeling can be grasped as a generational attempt to surpass postmodernism and a general response to our present, crisis-ridden moment

Question 18

What text did Tawfiq Yousef write?

Answer 18

Modernism, Postmodernism, and Metamodernism: A Critique

Question 19

How has Geoffrey Hill tried to moderate metamodernism?

Answer 19

• has tried to move beyond the extremities and instead sublimate them into a new form - a progression instead of a vacillation

Question 20

What is Geoffrey Hill’s ‘metamodernist’ poem?

Answer 20

‘The Triumph of Love’

Question 21

If you were going to use this theory in an essay how might you introduce it?

Answer 21

‘as recently designated by…’
[Van der Akker and Vermeulen]

‘arts movement first identified by…’

Question 22

When did post-modernism decline?

Answer 22

1970s then the inadequacy of postmodernism was realised in the 1990s

Question 23

How does metamodernism strive to reconstruct and why?

Answer 23

• postmodernism was a movement that encouraged us to deconstruct until we were distant from each other, reality and truth
• metamodernism aims to reconstruct those scattered pieces to form new and inspiring wholes

Question 24

What novels might we call ‘proto-metamodernist’?

and give detail why

Answer 24

• 1996: David Foster Wallace ‘Infinite Jest’
• broke the rules of the postmodernist novel
• comic and serious, ironic and sincere etc.
• Thomas Pynchon

Question 25

What term did Fukuyama coin at the beginning of the 2000s? and why?

Answer 25

• Francis Fukuyama termed the “return of History” at the beginning of the 2000s: the catastrophic events that called for a new philosophy to characterise the culture

Question 26

Why is metamodernism a ‘structure of feeling’?

Answer 26

• coined by Raymond Williams in 1954: Preface to Film
• a structure of feeling refers to the different ways of thinking vying to emerge at any one time in history
• problematises the concept of hegemony of Antonio Gramsci - says that ‘common sense’ or the dominant way of thinking in a particular time and place can never be total

Question 27

Why is metamodernism NOT a philosophy?

Answer 27

• a philosophy is a theory or attitude that acts as a guiding principle for behaviour
• this is not what metamodernism is doing - it is a means of characterising contemporary age