Tra le pieghe della storia. L’affermazione del Metamoderno

Postmodernism has shaped up to be the intellectual and creative interface of late capitalism, supported by a cultural logic imbued with «senses of the end of this or that» (F. Jameson): the end of history, of ideologies, of art, of the novel, of criticism, etc. However if, the novel has never ceased to thrive, becoming global, it was the postmodern episteme that quickly turned towards its end, progressively reabsorbed into a wider episteme, where the before and after the end of modern history have resumed their dialogue using a new creole language, whose vocabulary asks to be finally compiled and systematized. The novel that springs from this new episteme oscillates between the postmodern anti-narrative fluidity, which deconstructed regimes, identities, genres and cultures depriving them of the traditional patterns of realism, and the attempt to relocate that fluidity within new narrative patterns, which try to mediate between the disenchanting derealization of the postmodern and the enchanted realism of the modern. This essay reconstructs the affirmation of the category of metamodern to fully describe this momentous attempt of mediation enacted by the novel.