Open Collections

Krentz, Courtney

University of British Columbia

In 1989, the renowned postmodern scholar Linda Hutcheon suggested that the postmodern period had ended and that something new was beginning to take its place. Since this pronouncement, a distinct subset of literary scholarship has devoted itself to theorizing the contemporary, and numerous proposed successors to the postmodern have emerged. This thesis interrogates one such theory: Timotheus Vermeuelen and Robin van den Akker’s metamodernism. Like other theorists of the contemporary, Vermeulen and van den Akker attribute the contemporary period with a particular desire for authenticity and connection which is opposed to the attitudes of irony and nihilism that are typically associated with the postmodern. In their theory, Vermeulen and van den Akker associate this contemporary move to sincerity with a return to or redeployment of modernism. The authors thus place the ideology of postmodernism and modernism on two distinct poles, where the postmodern pole is associated with irony and nihilism and the modern pole is associated with earnest enthusiasm. Vermeulen and van den Akker argue that contemporary attitudes navigate the space between postmodern irony and modern enthusiasm by oscillating between them, tending at some times towards irony and at others towards earnestness. In this thesis, I argue that Vermeulen and van den Akker oversimplify the postmodern to only its most negative traits, and in doing so, they overlook how postmodernism has actually impacted our current historical moment. By analyzing first a canonical postmodern text (i.e., Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five) through the lens of Hutcheon’s historiographic metafiction, I demonstrate that postmodern works have a more ethical potential than the metamodern framework allows. I then turn to a contemporary work of metafiction (i.e., Childish Gambino’s Because the Internet) to illustrate how, when its ethical potential is considered, postmodernism can be understood to have a more nuanced and productive influence on the contemporary.

Text

2022-10-11

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/82850

English

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/