Metamodernism, the Anthropocene, and the Resurgence of Historicity: Ben Lerner’s 10:04 and “the utopian glimmer of fiction”

Postmodernism has been characterized by a reductive presentism that suppresses historicity and neglects the possibility of the future. If we have seen a shift from postmodernism to a different cultural logic and structure of feeling—as, indeed, many critics argue—it therefore follows that this may also entail a new dominant in temporal dynamics. In this article, I take Ben Lerner’s 2014 novel 10:04 as a case study in literary metamodernism, though I also make reference to Adam Thirlwell’s 2011 novella Kapow! and Ruth Ozeki’s 2013 novel A Tale for the Time Being. Across these texts, and primarily in 10:04 as a quintessentially metamodernist fiction, I observe and explicate a metamodern temporality characterized, interconnectedly, by the aesthetics of heterochrony, sideshadowing, and the anticipation of retrospection. Whilst this temporal dynamic emerges from the precarity and volatility of experience in the twenty-first century, anthropocenic climate change has been and remains—I suggest—the greatest catalyst in producing this new temporal experience which resurrects historicity and resuscitates the future as a field of possibilities.