Craft Pathology Report: Metamisframed

Metamodernism Isn't Here To Save You

(Meme, me, Cult of the Rainbow Rat, FB, 2020something, fuck who cares)

Y’all,

I suggest you read The Republic of Letters because it’s a dope fuckin’ spot and the editor is cool as shit. But I read this piece How Metamodernism Can Save Us All gave myself a while to decide (as Sam Kahn put in a note to think about a while back viz hottakes) whether this was a hot take, and since I’m the Editor here and there is no malice intended, no, this is not a hot take. So, I finished the novel I was doing a burn on for pub, because my ADHD makes me bad with deadlines but great at sticking landings even if I’m a little late. And yeah, I vibe with the general message of the piece as far as the spirit of optimism inherent goes, but if you gonna write up, please have your facts straight, because I’m just a college dropout.

- Emil

Craft Pathology Report:

Metamodernism Is Not Here To Save You

Metamodernism Isn’t Here to Save You

I’m responding in essay to the flawed account of metamodernism presented in “HOW METAMODERNISM CAN SAVE US ALL.” This isn’t a slight, an attack, and not written with any malice, but we all know I have a real hard time being quiet. The earnest tone and well meaning of the original argument though does falter terminally through historical imprecision, theoretical distortion, and a narrow basis. Just so we’re clear, my goal isn’t dismantling the piece for its own sake but we need to clarify: metamodernism isn’t a manifesto, a movement, or an ideology. It’s a critical stance. It’s a way to read, write, and live inside contradiction without pretending contradiction isn’t there.

I’m going to reconstruct a correct genealogy from modernism to postmodernism to metamodernism, and eludicate what metamodernism can and can’t claim. For the sake of argument I’ll anchor the essay with peer-reviewed research and foundational texts. Rarely necessary, but here unavoidable. I’m not interested in rhetorical attacks, if I made any we’d all know. Clarity, context, and evidentiary rigor carry the argument.

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An Entirely Correct Historical Genealogy

The original essay flattens modernism, postmodernism, and metamodernism into a “meaning lost, meaning regained” arc. That’s not what happened.

Modernism didn’t represent a clean culmination of Enlightenment ideals. It was a rupture. It emerged in response to industrial acceleration, world war, and the destabilization of old certainties (Greenblatt & Jacobus, 2009). Writers like Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and T.S. Eliot weren’t restoring meaning and didn’t intend to. They were dismantling inherited forms and reassembling fragments into something unstable, unfamiliar, and inquisitive.

Postmodernism, much the same, wasn’t just moral collapse or ironic detachment. As Fredric Jameson (1991) shows, it emerges from the cultural logic of late capitalism: media saturation, consumerism, and fragmented identities. Postmodernism doesn’t reject meaning wholesale; it interrogates the conditions under which meaning is produced. It turns toward pastiche, self-reference, and irony not as aesthetic flourishes but as structural inevitabilities.

Metamodernism arrives later, not as salvation, but as a structure of feeling (Vermeulen & van den Akker, 2010). It oscillates between modernist sincerity and postmodern skepticism, inhabiting both and avoiding the collapse of either. Luke Turner’s Metamodern Manifesto (2011) popularized the language but is better understood as provocation than theory. Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm’s Metamodernism: The Future of Theory (2021) extends this further, reframing metamodernism as an interdisciplinary methodology, a framework for analyzing cultural complexity without presuming return or resolution.

Metamodernism doesn’t restore belief or heal historical fractures. It gives us tools to navigate paradox and multiplicity, to care even while knowing, to hope without naivety, to build meaning provisionally rather than claim any absolutism.

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Defining Metamodernism In Brief

In its marrow metamodernism is oscillation moving between irony and sincerity, lingering in skepticism, reaching toward longing, fracture, and connection.(Vermeulen & van den Akker, 2010). It doesn’t resolve these poles but allows them to coexist. Metamodern works hold coexistent positions: we know this is constructed, and we care anyway

Turner’s manifesto conveys the affective appeal of this stance but stops short of grounding it theoretically. That scaffolding comes from peer-reviewed scholarship—particularly Vermeulen and van den Akker’s 2017 edited volume and Storm’s work reframing metamodernism as an analytic platform. Adam Kelly’s studies of New Sincerity (I fucking hate this term) fiction (2017) overlay here, tracing a cultural pull toward authenticity negotiated through self-awareness, but metamodernism is larger in scope and structurally distinct.

Where postmodernism tears certainty apart, metamodernism works inside the gap, generating art and theory that live inside contradiction, not outside it.

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A Curated Metamodern Reading Tour

The original essay leaned heavy on a few pop-cultural examples (Everything Everywhere All at Once, The Good Place, Inside), but literary texts readily illustrate metamodernism usually with much greater precision.

Below: a curated reading tour of twenty texts that enact metamodern sensibilities through form, voice, and affect.

These books do more than feel metamodern; they perform oscillation formally. Fragmentation and intimacy. Artifice and urgency. Irony, longing, both refusing collapse.

Core & MFA Adjacent/Contemporary Lit/Trad/Big 5

• Ben Lerner — 10:04 (2014)

• Jenny Offill — Dept. of Speculation (2014)

• Han Kang — The White Book (2016)

• Sheila Heti — How Should a Person Be? (2010)

• Rachel Cusk — Outline (2014)

• David Foster Wallace — Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999)

• Ali Smith — How to Be Both (2014)

• Zadie Smith — Swing Time (2016)

• George Saunders — Lincoln in the Bardo (2017)

• Sally Rooney — Normal People (2018)¹

Indie/Transgressive/Non Trad/Weird Shit

• Elle Nash — Animals Eat Each Other (2018)²

• Will Christopher Baer — Kiss Me, Judas (1998)³

• Scott McClanahan — Crapalachia (2013)

• Bud Smith — Teenager (2022)

• Brandon Hobson — Where the Dead Sit Talking (2018)

• Chelsea Hodson — Tonight I’m Someone Else (2018)

• Yukiko Motoya — The Lonesome Bodybuilder (2018)

• Bryan Washington — Lot (2019)

• Patricia Lockwood — No One Is Talking About This (2021)

• Mieko Kawakami — Breasts and Eggs (2020)

These works, and I don’t like all of them, but they do model metamodernism’s tonal complexity: autofiction, emotional intimacy, self-awareness refusing to extinguish vulnerability, fractured narratives rebuilding coherence provisionally and not absolutely, all thrown in a Vita-Mix

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Reframing Those Pop-Culture Examples

The original essay references Everything Everywhere All at Once, The Good Place, and Bo Burnham’s Inside⁴ as metamodern exemplars without demonstrating how the medias perform oscillation formally.

EEAAO works as an example when its tonal pivots are read structurally: absurdist comedy, glorious visual chaos, and deep cut familial sincerity coexisting without canceling any others out.

Inside rides the same line. Alienation staged, confession bleeding through, meaning performed and unraveling as it happens.

And The Good Place deserves more credit than the original essay gave it. Its absurd premise lets it get away with philosophy without killing the joke. Meaning stays fragile and ridiculous but worth chasing anyway. That’s the metamodern mood.

These media pull you in, yes, but novels are almost always a better proving ground. Lerner, Offill, Kang, Lockwood. They hold the tension on the page and keep form and feeling tangled, grounding metamodernism where theory hits affect.

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Correcting Misconceptions

Four critical clarifications⁵ anchor this whole damn thing:

1. Postmodernism ≠ nihilism. Lyotard’s (1984) “incredulity toward metanarratives” wasn’t despair, it was skepticism; Jameson (1991) frames postmodernism as structural, not moral collapse.

2. Deconstruction ≠ meaninglessness. Hutcheon (1988) shows postmodern irony operates as critique. It’s not erasure. Dismantling assumptions doesn’t destroy affective resonance.

3. Metamodernism ≠ salvation. It doesn’t rebuild meaning triumphantly, it models contingent investment in meaning while acknowledging its inherent instability.

4. Grand narratives aren’t restored. Metamodernism invites strategic, affective engagement with narratives, but knowing their construction doesn’t nullify their value.

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And…

Metamodernism isn’t here to settle, save, or act on anything. As a lens and framework it DOES invite us to live with no resolution. Engage without needing certainty. It doesn’t rebuild meaning. It only asks what meaning we’re willing to make.

No cure or epochal rupture, it’s a stance available for navigating the fractures postmodernism left open without collapsing into nostalgia or despair. We inhabit doubleness now. And it’s not a failure. it’s a framework we’ve been given to make art and stay in the conversation.

Bibliography

Core Sources

• Greenblatt, Stephen, and Lee A. Jacobus. The Norton Anthology of Western Literature. 8th ed., W.W. Norton & Company, 2009.
  (Contextual grounding for Enlightenment, modernism, and historical framing.)

• Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. Routledge, 1988.
  (Defines postmodern irony and self-reflexivity; essential viz clarifying critique vs. meaninglessness.)

• Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke University Press, 1991.
  (Foundational text on postmodern aesthetics, late capitalism, and media saturation. Go find a copy.)

• Kelly, Adam. “David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity⁶ in American Fiction.” Orbit: A Journal of American Literature, vol. 1, no. 1, 2017, pp. 1–20.
  (Frames “new sincerity” within literary contexts, relevant to metamodern affect.)

• Storm, Jason Ānanda Josephson. Metamodernism: The Future of Theory. University of Chicago Press, 2021.
  (Extends metamodernism beyond aesthetics into interdisciplinary analytic frameworks.)

• Turner, Luke. The Metamodernist Manifesto. 2011. http://www.metamodernism.org/.
  (Cultural provocation; useful for tracing terminology, not theoretical scaffolding.)

• Vermeulen, Timotheus, and Robin van den Akker. “Notes on Metamodernism.” Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, vol. 2, 2010, pp. 1–14.
  (Foundational essay defining metamodernism as oscillation and “structure of feeling.”)

• Vermeulen, Timotheus, Robin van den Akker, and Alison Gibbons, editors. Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, and Depth after Postmodernism. Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.
  (Expanded scholarly framework anchoring the genealogy. If you buy it for some reason, stick to used, the HC runs over a hundred.)

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Supplementary Sources

• Gibbons, Alison, Vermeulen, Timotheus, and Robin van den Akker. “Reality Beckons: Metamodernist Depthiness beyond Panfictionality.” European Journal of English Studies, vol. 23, no. 2, 2019, pp. 172–189.
  (Analyzes metamodern affect in autofiction and narrative form.)

• Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
  (Classic framing of “incredulity toward metanarratives”; central to correcting misconceptions.)

• Nealon, Jeffrey T. Post-Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism. Stanford University Press, 2012.
  (Situates metamodernism within shifting economic and cultural contexts.)

• Elyamany, Nashwa, and Noorhan Abbas. “Digital Humor Analysis of Bo Burnham’s Netflix Comedy Special Inside: New Sincerity, Postirony, and Metamodernism at Play.” Language and Semiotic Studies, 2025,
  (Deep read on Inside’s staged vulnerability and mediated affect.)

• Wallace, David Foster. “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.” Review of Contemporary Fiction, vol. 13, no. 2, 1993, pp. 151–194.
  (Anticipates metamodern tendencies a crucial linkage between postmodern irony and new sincerity.)⁷

1. Just not my bag, but whatever.

2. I’m maybe definitely really biased

3. I’m also maybe really definitely biased.

4. I’m problematic!

5. especially and specifically the first and second of the four. Ok. Now I’m going to go back to reading Foucalt.

6. FUCK THIS TERM

7. I had to do way too much extra work for this stupid essay.