IMAGES OF MODERNITY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY: METAMODERNISM

Abstract

After postmodernism’s key theorists abandoned the topic (Fredric Jameson) or even allowed that postmodernism is no longer exists (Linda Hutcheon), various concepts under the umbrella term “post-postmodernism” have begun to emerge since 2000. One of the last intellectual alternatives to post-modernism was the metamodernism proposed by two Europeans, Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker. In 2010 they published a kind of manifesto entitled Notes on Metamodernism in which they argued that there had been a pivot away from cynicism and irony toward sincerity and romance in the newly emerging culture. This pivot heralds the arrival of the new era of metаmodernism. The author of the article critically evaluates the manifesto and concludes that the concept of metamodernism does not stand up to scrutiny and has little of substance to offer. The metamodernism manifesto is at best a set of declarations. However, this does not mean that the metamodernists had not intuitively hit upon the key to cultural and social tendencies that are still not completely clear. At the end of 2017 a new collection of articles edited by Vermeulen and van den Akker was published. Even though the authors of the metamodernism concept had almost nothing new to offer and failed to develop their ideas any further, other researchers and thinkers with different theoretical orientations from the original authors have taken up the metamodernism impulse and made it qualitatively more interesting. The metаmodernism project has been developed with greater sophistication by theorists and also through empirical research. Metamodernism has been vindicated by the new life it has been given.