Afterword

It would seem better all round to accept the truth, which is that people are still solidly within the modernist era. McEwan's interest in time combines a distinctly modernist effort to simulate experiences of memory and duration in literary form, while also staging a more self-reflexive one might say, postmodern commentary on what art can reveal about such phenomenal sensations. Metamodernism simply offers a narratological starting-point and an organizational rubric for making practical decisions about selection. Joseph Brooker offers a showcase demonstration of close reading, one that moves the pay-offs of interpreting modernism's “stylistic afterlives” beyond the realm of influence, while reproducing in the very focus and appeal of his critical practice the same modern attentiveness to the word that affiliates Lorrie Moore and Joyce. “The Contemporaneity of Modernism” opens up a spectrum of materialist, narratological, interartistic, and cultural-historical approaches.