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

GIBBONS, Alison (2020). Metamodernism, the Anthropocene, and the Resurgence of Historicity: Ben Lerner’s 10:04 and “the utopian glimmer of fiction”. Critique - Studies in Contemporary Fiction.

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Abstract

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.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	2005 Literary Studies
Identification Number:	https://doi.org/10.1080/00111619.2020.1784828
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Elements
Depositing User:	Symplectic Elements
Date Deposited:	18 Jun 2020 10:42
Last Modified:	25 Dec 2021 01:18
URI:	https://shura.shu.ac.uk/id/eprint/26465

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