Postmodernism has had its day. Are we now in the era of epimodernism? Reinterpreting the six “memos” that Italo Calvino suggested more than thirty years ago for “the new Millennium”, in this acclaimed book Emmanuel Bouju identifies six new values for literature in the twenty-first century: Superficiality, Secrecy, Energy, Acceleration, Credit, and Follow Through. Based on the principal meanings of the Ancient Greek prefix epi – surface, contact, origin, extension, duration, authority, and finality – these values represent six different ways of relating to the legacy of modernist utopias, reorienting postmodern critique and rebooting, with all due irony, its various forms of engagement and empowerment. Equal parts cultural criticism and literary creation, this highly original essay both enacts and explores the epimodern turn in contemporary European literature. Rigorous and humorous, provocative and playful, Epimodernism helps us to understand what literature can describe, imagine, and invent in our challenging times.
Author(s): Emmanuel Bouju
Series: Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 221
City: Cham
Abstract
Contents
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Introduction
Bibliography
Chapter 2: Superficiality
Art’s Infancy
The Horse and the Bird
The Aviator of Oklahoma
The Paseo Game
CAPITAL K
The Letter’s Enigma
A Gesture of Commitment
Political Fiction
(Superficial) Transition
Bibliography
Chapter 3: Secret
Schrödinger’s Cat
A Consistent Fable
Acting as If
In the Mirror Box
Ghost Stories
The Anarchist, the Photographer and the Writer
Mujo and Suljo Return to Sarajevo
Lazarus and Rambo: Last Blood
In Praise of Nothingness
An Unusable Truth
For Whom Nada Tolls
(Secret) Transition
Bibliography
Chapter 4: Energy
Second-Degree Self-Portraits
Belshazzar on Horseback
Self-Exposure
The Magic Disk of Authority (2666)
An Endless Enigma
Exposure to the Elements
Encryption and Decryption
Sisyphus, or the Magic Disk
The Posthumous Author
(Energetic) Transition
Bibliography
Chapter 5: Acceleration
The Istorical (sic) Novel
Nobody Bears Witness for the Witness
The End of the Evidential Paradigm?
A Difference of Breathing
Conscription and Counter-Archiving
A Quasi-Past
Hollow Shells
The Library Fire and the Gilded Butterflies
The Ghost Riders
(Accelerated) Transition
Bibliography
Chapter 6: Credit
Authorising Ourselves (Literature)
Giving Oneself a Name
Posthumous Authority
The Novel’s Power
One Mode of Storytelling Against Another
Provisional Trust
What Is a Life Worth?
Transition (on Credit)
Bibliography
Chapter 7: Follow Through (Epilogues)
Consistency (Pierre Senges)
Formal Cohesion
Logical Coherence
Ruderal Constancy
Animal Consistency
An Automaton Dream (Olivier Cadiot)
The Voice of Deleuze
Monsieur Test
Phrasing
Conclusion
Bibliography
Postface to the English Edition
Post-Scriptum
Index
