Some Reflections on the Beginning of Metamodernism as a Cultural (and Literary) Paradigm

In recent decades – roughly the last thirty years, about the span of a generation – we have been witnessing postmodernism’s passage into, or entry within, a kind of synclinal (to borrow a term from geology): that is, a marked decline which nevertheless preserves an underground, subcultural, even sub-urban bridge at the level of cultural forms between modernism and the emerging pattern of metamodernism. If postmodernism seemed rather categorical in its rejection of grand narratives (including authority, history, at times even culture, and certainly divinity) yet hesitant in its modes of expression, relying on irony, pastiche, parody, and similar devices, the younger paradigm, provisionally called metamodernism, comes to correct some of the excesses of its predecessor and tends to counteract the deconstructionism proclaimed by postmodernism. Several features of emerging metamodern frameworks refer to the recovery or rectification of history in a revelatory sense, with consequences for the future and for posterity; the return to divinity, in various forms; the return to nature understood as a universal ecology; and last but not least, the restoration or reinvention of the Self together with the renewal of the personality’s affective capacities. Ultimately, the nascent metamodernism broadly claims, for the moment, to be an advocate of reconstruction – understood as re-mythologization, the infusion of things with religiosity or even sacrality, as well as re-humanization in a very expansive sense.