Anwar Abasi (Haras)
Abstract
This article examines the relationship between postmodernism and metamodernism in literature. Its central thesis is that moving beyond postmodernism does not mean rejecting that movement’s formal and technical achievements; rather, it can mean transforming the relationship between its tools and the worldview behind them.
By rejecting centrality, questioning grand narratives, and dissolving textual boundaries, postmodernism expanded literature at the levels of form and perspective. Yet this very process of dissolution can, if it becomes an end in itself, limit a text’s capacity to produce meaning and offer aesthetic experience.
In contrast, metamodernism, especially in the theoretical framework of Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker, is understood as a pendular or oscillatory condition between opposing poles: irony and sincerity, skepticism and hope, deconstruction and reconstruction, distance and connection.
The article proposes that, according to metamodern logic, postmodern techniques may still be effective in contemporary literature, provided that the orientation of their use changes. Thus, metafiction, intertextuality, fragmentation, and genre blending, features associated with postmodern texts, can serve meaning-making, sincerity, human feeling, and a new aesthetic, without necessarily carrying a postmodernist ideology.
Keywords: Postmodernism, metamodernism, aesthetics, form, metafiction, intertextuality, sincerity, irony.
Note: The word “irony” is used in two different senses. First, irony as a literary technique that can be used to create ambiguity, critique, mockery, and satire. Second, irony as an intellectual and aesthetic attitude toward absolute meaning and immutable beliefs; that is, the text does not easily commit itself to a single final meaning or a single fixed, static perspective, but instead makes questioning, hesitation, and the fluidity of meaning part of the text production process. In this article, I intend this second meaning of the word. In contrast to this sense, “sincerity” means a return to emotion, trust, meaning, hope, and the human experience, without the text relinquishing postmodern self-awareness, questioning, and doubt.
1. Introduction
Postmodernism is one of the most influential intellectual and artistic movements of the second half of the twentieth century. Developing within a set of distinct philosophical, social, and cultural conditions, this movement not only impacted literature, but also brought the relationship between text, language, history, identity, and meaning under question. From the perspective of Jean-François Lyotard, the postmodern is associated with an “incredulity toward metanarratives”; that is, skepticism toward those narratives that claim to offer an overarching explanation of history, knowledge, and societal issues. However, this understanding of postmodernism should not lead to a simple conflation of the movement with nihilism or accusing it of rejecting all meaning (Lyotard, 1984).
In the field of literature—or more specifically, in narrative—the impact of this movement is mostly seen at the level of form and narrative style. Intertextuality, metafiction, narrative fragmentation, breaking chronological timeline, genre-blending, pastiche, and parody became part of the formal toolkit of postmodern literature. These devices expanded the boundaries of the literary text and redefined the relationship between author, text, and reader in a novel way.
Yet, this shift also raises an important theoretical question: if the deconstruction of old foundations and boundaries was a central aspect of postmodernism, how can literature reconstruct meaning, emotion, and aesthetic experience after that deconstruction? Does the post-postmodern intellectual and aesthetic condition require a new way of engaging with both modern and postmodern legacies?
2. Postmodernism and the Deconstruction of Form
One of the most important characteristics of postmodernism in literature is the deconstruction of those boundaries and structures that were taken as the foundation of narrative in classical narrative and part of modernism. The postmodern text often does not see itself within these boundaries, so it begins disrupting them.
Within this framework, intertextuality pulls the text out of a singular and closed existence, connecting it with other texts, history, and culture. Metafiction heightens textual self-awareness; the text attempts to expose its own construction process and alert the reader to the constructed nature of narrative. Furthermore, breaking the chronological timeline and fragmenting the narrative disrupts the traditional unity of the work and conventional temporal logic. The text can move between memory, imagination, past, future, and present, depicting lived human experience through a non-linear structure. Likewise, genre-blending, for instance, reframes the relationship between form and content within a broader scope.
The significance of these techniques lies not merely in their formal novelty, but also in how they alter the reader’s role in the production of meaning. The reader is no longer a passive recipient of ready-made meaning; rather, they must participate in piecing together fragments, evaluating distinct voices, recognizing intertextual references, and reading between the lines.
From this perspective, postmodernism constitutes a crucial part of the formal paradigm shift in contemporary literature. However, this alone does not resolve the question of the aesthetic value of these forms.
3. From Technique to Worldview: The Problem of Means and Ends
Although there is now a general consensus that forms directly participates in the creation of meaning and cannot be separated from content, a fundamental distinction must be made here between technique and worldview. No form-building technique is, on its own, a specific worldview; for example, metafiction, fragmentation, intertextuality, and so forth can be utilized within the framework of different worldviews.
That is to say, a critique of postmodernism as a type of worldview must not turn into a critique of postmodern techniques. The problem arises when technique shifts from a means serving an aesthetic goal into a means that becomes its own end; meaning that in a postmodern text, for instance, the text continuously deconstructs itself without that deconstruction being used to construct a meaningful experience. This amounts to a kind of return to a Dadaist experience.
This distinction is crucial for literary theory because form in itself is not neutral. The choice of form is connected to the way experience is understood; yet this does not mean that every postmodern form necessarily expresses a postmodernist worldview.
Accordingly, the question “Is this technique postmodern?” must be changed to “What aesthetic and semantic function does this technique perform within this text?”
4. Metamodernism and Oscillating “In-Between”
The concept of metamodernism entered contemporary theoretical and aesthetic discourse more prominently starting in the 2010s. The 2010 article “Notes on Metamodernism” by Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker stands as one of the foundational and influential texts in this debate. They present metamodernism as an oscillation or “movement” between opposing poles, rather than a closed system where one side completely replaces the other (Vermeulen & van den Akker, 2010).
Within this framework, the prefix “meta-” can be interpreted as movement between positions. Consequently, metamodernism should not be simply defined as “new postmodernism” or a “return to modernism.”
From this perspective, metamodernism is a condition that moves back and forth between doubt and belief, irony and sincerity, distance and connection, deconstruction and reconstruction. This characteristic has been expanded to the fields of literature, film, and art in subsequent studies (van den Akker, Gibbons & Vermeulen, 2017).
Accordingly, instead of choosing one side over the other, or selecting between postmodernism and modernism, metamodernism can make the very tension itself an aesthetic medium.
5. From Postmodern Irony to Metamodern Sincerity
One of the central dimensions of metamodernism is the shift in the relationship between irony and sincerity. In postmodern culture, irony often serves to distance the text from any simple claim to truth. However, if irony remains the sole mode of engaging with the world, it can diminish the text’s capacity to establish affective connections.
Rather than rejecting irony, metamodernism seeks to bring irony and sincerity together within a single text. A text can remain fully conscious of its own constructed nature while simultaneously conveying a genuine feeling or restoring trust in a grand narrative.
In this sense, metamodern sincerity is neither a return to modern or classical naive textual innocence, nor is it a rejection of postmodern skepticism. Sincerity here exists alongside a theoretical awareness of the limitations of language and narrative.
In metamodern literary studies, this trajectory is frequently linked to concepts such as New Sincerity, affect, and hope. The goal there is not a return to unmediated sentimentality, but an effort to enable the text to reclaim emotion and human connection without losing its awareness of textual construction (Wang, 2022).
6. Reconstruction and the Problem of Meaning
If postmodernism was a deconstructive process, metamodernism can undertake the process of reconstruction. However, as noted, “reconstruction” here does not signify the re-establishment of a closed system and an ultimate truth; rather, it denotes the production of a temporary, relational, and perpetually open meaning.
This point marks a fundamental distinction from modernism. In its various forms, modernism often strives to reach a new and stable foundation; postmodernism casts doubt on this ambition; metamodernism can deploy these two experiences within a single process: constructing meaning alongside an awareness of that meaning’s incompleteness and impermanence.
From this perspective, literature does not need to discover an “ultimate meaning” to be meaningful. Instead, it can become part of the aesthetic experience through the very process of searching for meaning.
7. Metamodern Aesthetics: From Beauty to Aesthetic Experience
The shifting relationship between form and meaning must also be read within the framework of aesthetics. If postmodernism challenged the notion of a unified beauty and traditional aesthetic criteria, this does not signify the end of aesthetics. Within a metamodern framework, aesthetics can be understood not as “surface beauty,” but as a text’s ability to create a simultaneous affective and intellectual experience. Thus, fragmentation can coexist with unity; formal disruption with the establishment of connection; irony with sincerity; and doubt with hope.
This synthesis of opposites can serve as the foundation of metamodern aesthetics. A metamodern text may not be whole or unified, yet its fragments are brought into a deliberate relationship. The text may possess metafictional self-awareness, but this self-awareness does not destroy the reader’s feeling and experience.
In this way, aesthetics elevates itself from pure formalism to the “reconstruction of textual experience.” This transforms the relationship between form and content into a dynamic one, where form is neither a mere vessel for content nor an end in itself, but an integral part of the process of meaning-making.
8. Postmodern Techniques in the Metamodern Text
Within the framework of metamodernism, the core question is not whether postmodern techniques should be used or not; rather, the question is to what purpose and within what aesthetic relationship they are deployed.
Metafiction can expose the constructed nature of the text while simultaneously allowing the reader to establish an affective connection with the character’s experience or a human narrative.
Textual fragmentation can illustrate the complexity of human experience and the incompleteness of memory, yet that very fragmentation can, through rhythm, allusion, a central image, or a recurring motif, construct a form of unity as well.
Intertextuality can transcend a formal game of references to become a text’s dialogue with history and its own legacy, just as genre-blending can break generic boundaries to configure a new form organically connected to the content.
To demonstrate these characteristics in a Kurdish text, I can point to my own novel (the author of this article), Hazar Twei Hangaxora (The Labyrinth of the Anteater), which was written precisely according to this logic.
Here, I must reiterate a point I often emphasize: there is a crucial distinction between “using technique” and “displaying technique.” A good text is not one that contains the maximum number of techniques, but rather one in which techniques are necessary to its semantic and aesthetic structure, helping construct the appropriate form for the narrative.
9. Metamodernism and the Condition of Contemporary Literature
Above all, we must steer clear of the reductive declaration regarding the “end of postmodernism.” Postmodernism continues to manifest in various ways across literature, art, and theory, and metamodernism does not claim to serve as a uniform epoch or a total replacement for that movement.
It is more fruitful to read metamodernism as a descriptor for a new sensibility and a set of aesthetic and intellectual strategies that have emerged within the post-postmodern condition. This framing allows postmodernism to be seen not as a “completed phase,” but rather as an enduring legacy that remains influential within culture and art.
Metamodern literature can draw upon both legacies: on the one hand, the postmodern awareness regarding language, power, and textual construction; and on the other hand, the modern impulse toward meaning, connection, experience, and transformation.
10. Conclusion
Postmodernism brought about a fundamental shift in the understanding of text, form, and meaning. The deconstruction of grand narratives, the critique of centralism, intertextuality, metafiction, temporal fragmentation, and genre-blending were all part of that formal and theoretical transformation. Consequently, any attempt to move beyond postmodernism without taking these achievements into account would remain historically and aesthetically limited.
At the same time, if deconstruction becomes an end in itself, it can erode the process of meaning-making and the text’s affective connection. Therefore, the dilemma of post-postmodern literature should not be reduced to a choice between a “return to the old” or a “continuation of the new.” Rather, the central question is how the achievements of deconstruction can be integrated with the capacity for reconstruction.
Metamodernism offers one framework for reading this shift. Its significance lies in the fact that instead of choosing between modernism and postmodernism, it makes oscillation between them its starting point. Within this framework, doubt and belief, irony and sincerity, fragmentation and unity, as well as deconstruction and reconstruction, can co-exist within a coherent text.
Accordingly, metamodernism should not be read as a declaration of the “return of beauty” or the “end of postmodernism.” Instead, it can be understood as a theoretical and aesthetic effort to re-examine the relationship between form, meaning, and human experience. From this perspective, the metamodern text can deploy postmodern techniques, but toward a different end: not to sustain endless deconstruction, but to explore what can be constructed in the aftermath of deconstruction.
Ultimately, what metamodernism proposes to literature is neither an ultimate meaning nor a new closed system; rather, it offers a new way of engaging with the incompleteness and contradictions of human experience. Within this framework, a new aesthetic can emerge precisely where the text carries both the capacity to deconstruct and the capacity to reconstruct—that is, where the text can cast doubt on its own meaning while persistently continuing its effort to construct meaning.