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Utopia, Sort of: A Case Study in Metamodernism
... across Europe and the USA) or, on the other, the influential anti-systemic movements in countries like Greece, Italy and Spain. 61 According to Vermeulen and van den Akker, metamodernism is perhaps best seen as the cultural and artistic expression of humankind's transient yet hopefully transcendent nature, thus reconciling "a modern desire for sens and a postmodern doubt about the sense of it all", 62 which may translate as a (sometimes ironic) return of utopian tropes. At any rate, this involves the resurgence of a Romantic sensibility. ...
The commodification of the past, key to the so-called 'economics of nostalgia', has given rise to an emerging interdisciplinary research field. By way of example, scholarship has visibly inquired into the concept of heritage within the area of tourism studies. However, the scope of such studies is also being widened to cover the way in which popular culture has appropriated history and offers it for mass consumption. Thus, a substantial body of research has focused on the historical film, which has largely engaged historians and cultural, film and media studies scholars in a debate, mostly on the debasement of history resulting from the commodification of the past in popular media. Interestingly, this debate largely fails to address the fact that the historical film, a form of historical fiction, is in many ways related to the historical novel, another form of narrative that pre-dates it. And the historical novel is currently experiencing an extraordinary revival, to such an extent that critics have officially announced a 'historical turn' in British literature – and perhaps this concept should be extended to cover other national literatures like Spanish literature in which the commercial and critical success of historical fiction is being replicated. Most importantly, this debate ignores an absolutely essential question, namely why (the commodification of) the past is such an important part of our present.
In this light, this article will briefly inquire into the nature of historical fiction (what makes a novel 'historical'?) before providing an overview of those factors that account for this genre’s evolution. This includes its remarkable success in the nineteenth century, its demise throughout most of the twentieth century, and finally its resurrection at the turn of the new Millennium. This overview will lead to epistemological considerations, as evidence will be presented suggesting that a new way of making sense of reality is gaining ground. The conclusion will be reached that a sense of nostalgia is central to this new cultural sensibility, which goes a long way towards accounting for the relevant role that the commodification of the past plays in today’s culture.
Günümüz hâkim sanat anlayışlarından olan postmodernizmin tarihsel süreç içerisinde kültürel, ekonomik, siyasi ve çevresel değişkenlere bağlı olarak yaşadığı dönüşümler özellikle Batı toplumları içerisinde kuramın tartışılmasına ve/ya kurama bağlı olarak yeni alternatiflerin arayışına zemin hazırlamıştır. Özellikle Batıʼda hâlihazırdaki post-postmodern çağ olarak tanımlanan evre içerisinde söz konusu arayışlara paralel olarak 1990ʼlı yıllardan itibaren farklı eğilimlerin ortaya çıktığı gözlemlenmiştir. Modern-postmodern tercihin arasında bir alternatif olarak konumlanan metamodernizm de bu eğilimlere örnek olarak düşünülebilir. Bir ihtiyaç ve arayışın doğal sonucu şeklinde kendini gösteren metamodernizm, kuramsallaşma ve pratiğe dökülme bakımından hâlâ gelişim sürecini devam ettirmektedir. Bu çalışmanın amacı metamodernizmi genel hatlarıyla tanıtarak edebiyatla olan bağlarını teknik düzeyde göstermek ve örneklemektir. Kuramın öne çıkan temsilcilerinden Timotheus Vermeulen ve Robin van den Akkerʼin belirlemiş olduğu temel ilkeler ve roman sanatının değişkenleri çalışmanın muhteva ve yöntemini biçimlendirmiştir. Kurama dair örnekler ise İhsan Oktay Anarʼın Puslu Kıtalar Atlası (1995) eserinden tercih edilmiştir. Yapılan incelemeler neticesinde metamodernizmin edebî eserlerde daha çok birey, duygu durumu, söylem ve kurguya tesir ettiği ve roman formu özelinde özellikle olay örgüsü, kişi kadrosu ve temalar üzerinde belirleyici bir görünüm kazandığı sonucuna ulaşılmıştır.
Arts and humanities suffer from a lack of prestige which is easily relatable to the ‘utilitarianism’ that has become the driving force in the so-called developed world. While the authors comment on the dangers that this approach entails, they also argue that the humanities themselves are partly to blame for this crisis, having largely isolated themselves from an increasingly changing society. It is therefore imperative that the humanities should once and for all prove themselves relevant, leaving behind ‘departmentalized’ approaches to academic knowledge, and embracing the social mission that once epitomized humanistic study.
Guided by such principles, this chapter introduces the fourteen remaining chapters in this volume, all of which showcase interdisciplinary studies that explore exciting intersections between different areas of academic research. These studies essentially address three broad topics, which function as this volume’s structural axes: identity, gender, and space and mobility (both voluntary, as in tourism, or imposed, as in the case of migrations and persecutions). Altogether, the volume demonstrates that the humanities, far from being artificially detached from the enormously complex context which is contemporary Europe, can actually study it and crucially point the way to a better, more equitable world.
This paper identifies the need for a pedagogical re-orientation in UK higher education to prepare graduates to overcome wicked problems. In addition to key knowledge sets, graduates need attributes of critical self-reflection, risk-awareness and management, collaboration, creativity, agility, reflexivity – enabling the ability to manage the unknown. In response, researchers have acknowledged the importance of pedagogies that are risk-oriented, creative, and reflective to remedy modernist banking methods. This paper acknowledges that while such pedagogies are underutilised, an antagonistic dichotomy between modernist banking methods (bad) and enquiry and risk-oriented approaches (good) is unhelpful as both approaches are necessary. This paper develops a metamodern framework to guide pedagogic practices to facilitate a disposition among learning strategists and practitioners which embraces oscillation between banking and radical pedagogic approaches. In turn this enables the development of student sensibilities, empowering them to challenge the growing wickedness with which they must do battle.
The paper addresses the cultural paradigm of metamodernism as conceived by Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker (2010). Ontologically, metamodernism is perceived as oscillating between the modern and the postmodern, whereby the tools of postmodernism (such as irony, sarcasm, parataxis, deconstruction, scepticism and nihilism) are employed to counter (but not obliterate) modernist naivety, aspiration and enthusiasm. This oscillation results in what the above authors have termed “informed naivety,” a phrase denoting a state of wilful pragmatic idealism that allows for the imagining of impossible possibilities. Vermeulen and van den Akker’s two key observations about the shift from postmodernism to metamodernism in contemporary art are discussed in this paper, namely the (re)appearance of sensibilities corresponding to those of Romanticism and the (re)emergence of utopian desires, in an attempt at a metamodernist analysis of the Netflix adaptation of the Bridgerton book series, aimed primarily at elucidating its popularity as one of the most watched programmes of the global Covid-19 pandemic.
In the past twenty years, the continued relevance of the term postmodernism for literary studies has increasingly been called into question. In the wake of this re-evaluation of literary terminology, many new terms have been coined, frequently associated still with a “-modern” suffix. This paper suggests that while the new modernisms hold relevance for specific concerns of contemporary literature, they have yet to provide an alternative framing for dominant trends. This is the case even when, as for metamodernism, a term has begun to move into general usage. The new modernisms, we suggest, are caught in a reductive association to the past which minimises their applicability to the dynamic newness of contemporary writing, particularly as it responds to ethico-political concerns. As an alternative to these terminologies we suggest “transglossic”, capturing the movement across forms and identities that uniquely defines contemporary literature.
Tässä artikkelissa tarkastelen metamodernia utooppisuutta kahdessa vuonna 2016 ilmestyneessä romaanissa, Emma Puikkosen Eurooppalaisissa unissa ja Riikka Pulkkisen Parhaassa mahdollisessa maailmassa, joita yhdistävät samankaltaiset muotoratkaisut ja Euroopan lähihistorian käsittely. Pyrin osoittamaan, kuinka romaanit koettavat ylittää postmodernin ironisen eetoksen ja kuinka aikamme utopianvastaisuus ja toisaalta tarve utooppiselle ajattelulle tematisoituvat romaanien tavassa käsitellä eurooppalaista lähihistoriaa.
Translator's Introduction: This essay appears to have been occasioned by a passing remark made by Kant's colleague and follower Johann Schultz in a 1784 article in the Gotha Learned Papers. In order to make good on Schultz's remark, Kant wrote this article, which appeared in the Berlinische Monatsschrift late in the same year. This is the first, and despite its brevity the most fully worked out, statement of his philosophy of history. The “idea” referred to in the title is a theoretical idea, that is, an a priori conception of a theoretical program to maximize the comprehensibility of human history. It anticipates much of the theory of the use of natural teleology in the theoretical understanding of nature that Kant was to develop over five years later in the Critique of the Power of Judgment. But this theoretical idea also stands in a close and complex relationship to Kant's moral and political philosophy, and to his conception of practical faith in divine providence. Especially prominent in it is the first statement of Kant's famous conception of a federation of states united to secure perpetual peace between nations. The Idea for a Universal History also contained several propositions that were soon to be disputed by J. G. Herder in his Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Humanity, leading to Kant's reply in his reviews of that work (1785) and in the Conjectural Beginning of Human History (1786). Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht was first published in the Berlinische Monatsschrift IV (November 11, 1784).
Television has often been argued to prefer the rhetorics of the narrative, that is, plot, ‘action’ (dialogue) and character over the aesthetics of the image (choices in mise-en-scene). It has also been frequently said to prioritize straightforward and static composition instead of more complicated arrangements, and operate through closeups and two-shots rather than long shots. The so-called ‘Quality TV’ of the last twenty-five years is thought to have increasingly rebuffed these conventions, holding rhetoric and aesthetic in more equal value, adopting what is often (yet at times wrongly) called a ‘cinematic style’.
In this essay we argue that the transition from ‘Television’ to ‘Quality Television’ is not so much a qualitative evolution, as that it is a passage from one discourse of what the philosopher Jacques Rancière calls ‘imageness’ to another that is visible elsewhere in the arts as well. By resituating the transition from ‘TV’ to ‘Quality TV’ in terms of ‘imageness’, we relocate the debate about ‘Quality TV’, and expand it beyond its narrow and ill-definable criteria of ‘quality’. Although we take a number of television programmes into account, we primarily focus on one serialized drama, Mad Men (AMC, 2007– ) and one particularly illustrative aspect of its ‘imageness,: what we will term the ‘late’ or ‘delayed’ cut.
