Metamodernism

Metamodernism is a cultural sensibility that moves between modernist hope and postmodern skepticism. It often combines sincerity with irony rather than settling on either.

Modernism: A cultural movement that pursued new forms and often trusted progress, innovation, and coherent meaning. Metamodernism revives modernism’s hopes while refusing its confidence as a settled position.
Timotheus Vermeulen: A Dutch cultural theorist who co-developed the concept of metamodernism. He helped formulate metamodernism as a framework for interpreting contemporary culture.
Boyhood: A 2014 film by Richard Linklater, filmed over twelve years and following a boy’s growth into adulthood. Its ordinary emotional realism exemplifies metamodern openness to sincere experience.
Post-postmodernism: A broad label for cultural approaches said to follow or revise postmodernism. Metamodernism is one specific account within the wider debate over what follows postmodernism.
Postmodernism: A cultural movement marked by skepticism toward grand narratives, stable meanings, and claims to universal truth. Metamodernism inherits postmodern doubt but moves beyond irony as its final stance.
Robin van den Akker: A Dutch philosopher and cultural theorist who co-developed the concept of metamodernism. His writing with Vermeulen established the term’s influential theoretical account.
Everything Everywhere All at Once: A 2022 film by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert about a woman navigating a multiverse and family conflict. It joins absurdist irony to earnest claims about love, care, and meaning.
Digimodernism: A theory describing cultural change driven by digital technologies and interactive textual production. It explains post-postmodern culture through digital participation rather than oscillating sensibilities.
Irony: A mode of expression in which meaning differs from, or is complicated by, the surface statement. Metamodern works use irony without letting it cancel emotional commitment.
Notes on Metamodernism: A 2010 essay by Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker outlining metamodernism as a cultural structure of feeling. This essay supplied the concept’s most widely cited initial formulation.

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Postmodern literatureCompared with: It offers a later account of writing that seeks sincerity without simply abandoning postmodern doubt.