Originally published on eve.gd on 10 February 2012, last updated 6 September 2026.
Read this post on the web (with images, PDF and citation details)
I am pleased to announce that I will be speaking at the "What Happens Now" conference at the University of Lincoln on twenty-first century fiction.
By the publication of Infinite Jest in 1996, it had long been David Foster Wallace's [1962-2008] ambition to move beyond the now “critical and destructive” postmodern irony that he claimed introduced “sarcasm, cynicism, a manic ennui, suspicion of all authority, suspicion of all constraints on conduct” into literature and culture. With the posthumous publication of The Pale King [2011], scholars can now begin to appraise Wallace's twenty-first-century writing against that ambition.
Meanwhile, a cursory glance at the twenty-first-century fiction of Thomas Pynchon [1937-], the most frequently-named influence upon Wallace, appears to reveal a similar shift. Both Against the Day [2006] and Inherent Vice [2010] seem to alternate between a playfulness and a mode that abandons many of the metafictive devices and tropes of indeterminacy exemplified in V. [1963], The Crying of Lot 49 [1966] and Gravity's Rainbow [1973], for which Pynchon is now typecast as the godfather of American postmodernity.
In this paper I will train a harsh critical gaze upon an emergent strain of post-postmodernism that purports to rethink these issues: “metamodernism”. Simultaneously, I will amalgamate Walllace's and Pynchon's often assumed, but never fully formulated, points of convergence while disturbing the concept of a millennial turning point for a revived, ethically-viable fiction. While Wallace worked to demonstrate “that cynicism and naievety are mutually compatible” (Boswell 2003) – an aim accurately described by “metamodernism” – much of Pynchon's fiction can also be so described; it appears that metamodernism's Vice could be Inherent within postmodern literature. Indeed, although it is accurate to describe both of these writers as metamodern, as a form of post-postmodernism, metamodernism cannot be used as a temporal specifier, but rather as an identifier of important shared thematic attributes; those aspects that point toward a regulative utopianism.
Featured image by Steve Rhodes under a CC-BY license.
This reference list has been generated, in many cases, through an automated process and may therefore contain errors or incomplete metadata. It is provided purely as assistance for finding the items mentioned within this post.
1. Rhodes, Steve, ‘Steve Rhodes’, Flickr <http://www.flickr.com/photos/ari/>
2. What Happens Now conference at Lincoln <http://www.lincoln.ac.uk/home/campuslife/whatson/eventsconferences/event%20name,8029,en.html>
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ari/
http://www.lincoln.ac.uk/home/campuslife/whatson/eventsconferences/event%20name,8029,en.html