Metamodernism: A New Era or a Myth? | Maksym Nestelieiev on His New Book

📚 Hello, Sententiae Community!

We invite you to watch a new episode of the Sententiae Community podcast in our “Books” series, dedicated to metamodernism, its theoretical foundations, and the ways it helps us understand contemporary culture.

▪️ Host – Vlada Davidenko, editor and researcher at the Sententiae Community.

▪️ Guest – Maksym Nestelieiev, Ukrainian literary scholar, translator, PhD in Philology, cultural critic and columnist, and researcher of American postmodernism and contemporary literature.

📖 At the heart of our conversation is Maksym Nestelieiev’s new monograph, Metamodernism: Between Outdated Irony and New Sincerity. In the book, the author examines the concepts proposed by 37 scholars of metamodernism, exploring the diversity of theoretical interpretations, the contradictions between them, and the possibilities of applying these approaches to contemporary literature and culture.

📚 In this episode, we discuss:

▪️ Maksym Nestelieiev’s intellectual journey from studying Ukrainian modernism to researching American postmodernism and metamodernism;

▪️ the relationship between translation and literary scholarship, the challenges of working with complex texts by American writers, and the practice of close reading;

▪️ the problem of cultural periodization: do modernism, postmodernism, and metamodernism truly succeed one another, and how justified is the idea of clear boundaries between cultural eras?

▪️ the concept of oscillation in metamodernist theory, its explanatory potential, and why its original proponents later reconsidered it;

▪️ the methodological challenges of defining metamodernism, the diversity of its theoretical interpretations, and the problem of establishing criteria for distinguishing metamodern cultural phenomena from others;

▪️ the relationship between theory and artistic practice, including the deliberate application of metamodernist concepts in contemporary cinema;

▪️ the changing role of irony in contemporary culture, its relationship with new sincerity, and the possibility of combining critical distance with empathy, compassion, and a renewed commitment to values.