Metamodernism - (Radical Cultural Studies) by Robin Van Den Akker & Alison Gibbons & Timotheus Vermeulen (Paperback)

About the Book

Brings together many of the most influential voices in the scholarly and critical debate about post-postmodernism and twenty-first century aesthetics, arts and culture.

Book Synopsis

Brings together many of the most influential voices in the scholarly and critical debate about post-postmodernism and twenty-first century aesthetics, arts and culture.

Review Quotes

I hope this book becomes required reading for scholars and think tanks, or any students studying postmodernism and beyond, so we could at least adopt a common 'language' (as they describe it) to reduce the excessive redundancy and conict in academia and contemporary social thought. This is what the 'principle of abstraction' from computer science does, and is much needed in our cultural programming.

If you're in the market for a slick, shiny new aesthetic of the post-post or the meta-, you won't find it here - but you won't find it anywhere else, either, because it doesn't exist. If, however, you genuinely want to understand the "sticky mess" (in Jörg Heiser's phrase) that the new cultural practices are in the very process of emerging from, then you owe it to yourself to give this volume your fullest attention.

In 2002, Linda Hutcheon famously announced the end of postmodernism. What has been happening in the areas of arts, culture, aesthetics, and politics ever since? Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, and Depth after Postmodernism provides an answer to this question. The book is truly impressive in terms of both its theoretical scope and the discussion of representative examples of metamodernism.

Metamodernism is the best collection of essays on our time's most notable cultural development: the turning of postmodernism into something else. The project's heart is van den Akker and Vermeulen's 2008 milestone essay "Notes on Metamodernism," which beats across a volume bringing together Alison Gibbons, Lee Konstantinou, Josh Toth, James MacDowell, Raoul Eshelman, and other distinguished critics of the contemporary.

About the Author

Robin van den Akker is Lecturer in Continental Philosophy and Cultural Studies at Erasmus University College Rotterdam.
Alison Gibbons is Reader in Contemporary Stylistics at Sheffield Hallam University.
Timotheus Vermeulen is Associate Professor in Media, Culture and Society at the University of Oslo.