Metamodern Subject: Towards Metaxy and Fragmentation

Abstract

The very last quarter of the century is characterised by a large-scale and deep-seated changes which distinguish it from the postmodern epoch. This is in part due to globalisation that has remolded the economic, social and cultural space. Those unprecedented alterations manifest themselves in all areas of human life as the key features of the contemporary cultural landscape. One of its mains, which must not be treated with eyes wide shut, is the reemerged subject that should be taken neither as the old modern nor the postmodern one as it encompasses no transcendental explanations. Concepts like identity, selfhood and subjectivity might continuously be dismantled and deconstructed.The fact that the theme of identity is engaged as an episteme to delineate metamodernist novelists’ conceptions can seem as if snappishly chosen, yet this is not the case. The question comes as follows: why exactly the theme of identity is singled out among others, particularly in metamodernist literature? The thematic should be considered within the historical context of metamodernism, which is not by chance coincided with the twenty-first century transformations. Identity has been one of the debatable issues among scholars from different disciplines since antiquity; it has never been cartelised by a certain discipline or field. However, more than ever before, new-fangled technologies at the turn of the twenty century have made identity a pinnacle compared to other themes. The first-time changes, which have resulted from the rise of technologies, and new forms of communication, have overlapped with the new sensitivity of 'metamodernism. As long as the centrality of language in literary works and linguistics as the study of language has the authority to study literature, the paper adopted linguistic analysis, notably stylistics. By virtue of the latter, it is argued that literary writers, namely metamodernist novelists have contributed to such an exchange over identity. Through a microscopic analysis of forms, functions, and meanings of literary language in a systematic way, it is asserted that the influx, hence, of values, morals, behaviours, and the multiple, fragmented and oscillating self is unequivocally exhibited in the metamodernist novels.