T.J.V. Vermeulen

Notes on metamodernism

The postmodern years of plenty, pastiche, and parataxis are over. In fact, if we are to believe the many academics, critics, and pundits whose books and essays describe the decline and demise of the postmodern, they have been over for quite a while now. But if these commentators agree the postmodern condition has been abandoned, they appear less in accord as to what to make of the state it has been abandoned for. In this essay, we will outline the contours of this discourse by looking at recent developments in architecture, art, and film. We will call this discourse, oscillating between a modern enthusiasm and a postmodern irony, metamodernism. We argue that the metamodern is most clearly, yet not exclusively, expressed by the neoromantic turn of late associated with the architecture of Herzog & de Meuron, the installations of Bas Jan Ader, the collages of David Thorpe, the paintings of Kaye Donachie, and the films of Michel Gondry.

Book Review: German television studies: Cartography of a debate

workers – Neves opens up several new lines of inquiry, not just in China. This chapter alone makes the exercise of an updated look on Chinese media and society a worthy effort. Although breaking no significant new ground to this jaded reviewer, the book nonetheless offers to uninitiated readers a quick tutorial on Chinese TV drama and is best digested alongside several earlier books on Chinese television in general and TV dramas in particular, for a sense of Chinese television and society in transit and transformation. The book is a little long on textual analyses and short on audiences and reception, something future publications on Chinese television might seek to address.