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Oscillating Towards the Sublime - Notes on Metamodernism

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Postmodernism is dead, but its successor has not yet been crowned. Attributes of that successor have, however, begun to be elucidated. Among them is the idea that, after the scepticism of postmodernism, interest is re-emerging in the inexplicable, the unspeakable, in the things that cannot be encompassed rationally. Florian Niedlich calls this development a ‘religious turn’; Wolfgang Funk calls it ‘the return of the supernatural’.[1] While there are clear differences between these two approaches, I believe they stem from the same source: the questioning of the Enlightenment idea that it is possible to have “confidence in the absolute and indisputable command of enlightened human understanding to analyse and account for each and every phenomenon it encounters.”[2] Instead of deciding between a religious or supernatural turn, for now I will simply examine how three supposedly irrational elements of contemporary fiction interrelate. The first two have been seen before: the mode of the fan

Postmodernism is dead, but its successor has not yet been crowned. Attributes of that successor have, however, begun to be elucidated. Among them is the idea that, after the scepticism of postmodernism, interest is re-emerging in the inexplicable, the unspeakable, in the things that cannot be encompassed rationally. Florian Niedlich calls this development a ‘religious turn’; Wolfgang Funk calls it ‘the return of the supernatural’. [1] While there are clear differences between these two approaches, I believe they stem from the same source: the questioning of the Enlightenment idea that it is po

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