Robin van den Akker

Moreover, since the turn of the millennium, we have seen the emergence of various ‘new’, often overlapping, aesthetic phenomena such as the New Romanticism in the arts (Vermeulen and van den Akker 2010), the New Mannerism in crafts (van Tuinen, this volume), the New Aesthetic in design (Sterling 2012), the New Sincerity in literature (Konstantinou 2009, 2016a), the New Weird or Nu-Folk in music (Poecke 2014), Quirky Cinema and Quality Television (MacDowell 2012; Vermeulen and Rustad 2013), as well as the discovery of a new terrain for architecture (Allen and McQuade 2011), each of them characterised by an attempt to incorporate postmodern stylistic

‘Postmodernism is dead, but something altogether weirder has taken its place’ (2009

emphasis on three particular strategies that for her defy postmodernism: ‘connectionism (as a mode of thinking), bootstrapping (as a way of identifying connections) and the principle of theory overlapping’ which, she argues, ‘are but aspects of metamodernism’ (2007

movements (Occupy, the Tea Party), stylistic registers (the New Sincerity, Freak Folk) and philosophies (Speculative Realism, OOO)

postmodern – nor, indeed, are we pushing a metamodern agenda.
Second, and crucially, metamodernism – as a structure of feeling or cultural logic – is developed through a systematic reading of dominant tendencies in contemporary

flawed essay, for sure. We failed, for instance, to recognise and include the emergent nationalist, if not fascist, tendencies in contemporary culture as mediated through, say, the overtly neoromantic work of Dennis Rudolph

compatible (2006, 79). Some treat it as a cultural superstructure in the classical Marxian sense or as cultural hegemonic following a more Gramscian notion;

experience’ (Williams 1954, 40). In other words, a structure of feeling is a sentiment, or rather still a sensibility that everyone shares, that everyone is aware of, but which cannot easily, if at all, be pinned down.

that when one has measured the work against the separable parts, there yet remains some element for which there is no external counterpart. This element, I believe, is what I have named the structure of feeling of a period

level. In contrast, the prefix ‘meta-’ evokes a moment in which the past and the future are seen as alternative credit issuers