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Say Hello to Metamodernism!: Understanding Today's Culture of Hyper-Reflexivity, Ironesty, and Felt Experience
Say Hello to Metamodernism is a guided tour of one of the newer “isms”: metamodernism, the cultural period many say began emerging around the turn of the millennium, after irony-bound, depth-allergic postmodernism had lost much of its charm. By emphasizing qualities such as individual interiority – and by braiding playful irony or experimentation with an unabashed delight in the intricacies of being human – metamodern cultural products are said to engage and move beyond the conflict between postmodernism’s ironic relativism and its predecessor modernism’s adamant faith in progress and objectively knowable truth. Though the book is not a memoir, per se, the author, Greg Dember, weaves the story of his own encounters with society’s shifting aesthetic sensibilities into an exploration of representative metamodernist work by musicians such as Sufjan Stevens, Elliott Smith and Billie Eilish; by filmmakers like Miranda July and Wes Anderson and Greta Gerwig; by novelists such as Dave Eggers, Elif Batuman and Tope Folarin; and in television shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Bojack Horseman and Atlanta, while also covering how the metamodern sensibility is expressed in contemporary design, slang, religion and politics. Dember writes in a thoughtful, engaging style that is effective both at translating existing academic concepts into language meaningful to ordinary fans of the arts (and artists themselves) and introducing his original ideas about metamodernism to scholarly theorists of the arts and culture.
About the Greg Dember is co-founder (2013) of whatismetamodern.com, I have spoken about metamodernism on many podcasts, most notably an episode receiving 3,300,000 views on Thomas Flight’s Youtube channel. An independent researcher, I have been selected to present on metamodernism-related topics at six academic conferences, and have published three articles or chapters about metamodernism in academic publications. My popular Medium article, “After Eleven Metamodern Methods in the Arts,” is influential among lay audiences and has even been cited in peer-reviewed academic writing on metamodernism. My thinking partner Linda Ceriello and I co-host our own youtube channel. My B.A. (1987) is from Yale University.
About the Greg Dember is co-founder (2013) of whatismetamodern.com, I have spoken about metamodernism on many podcasts, most notably an episode receiving 3,300,000 views on Thomas Flight’s Youtube channel. An independent researcher, I have been selected to present on metamodernism-related topics at six academic conferences, and have published three articles or chapters about metamodernism in academic publications. My popular Medium article, “After Eleven Metamodern Methods in the Arts,” is influential among lay audiences and has even been cited in peer-reviewed academic writing on metamodernism. My thinking partner Linda Ceriello and I co-host our own youtube channel. My B.A. (1987) is from Yale University.
- GenresNonfiction
328 pages, Paperback
Published September 17, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
December 17, 2025
One day, as I was sitting around reading, I felt I should learn more about literary theory. I get these sudden urges - it's a quirk of my character. Accordingly, I started reading about Foucalt and Derrida and immediately knew that I had taken up something beyond my league. I mean, being a chemical engineer, it is very easy for me to understand simple things like entropy and fugacity, but I have to confess that postmodernism blew my mind.
I started asking erudite young people of my acquaintance to explain the concepts of literary theory to me in words of one syllable. Most of them looked oddly at me and sidled away; some laughed; and some shook their heads pityingly, and wiped away a tear or two. (It apparently seems that anyone trying to understand these concepts unless academically required is viewed as mildly touched in the head.) Then a Gen Z kid among the lot pointed me to a talk by Greg Dember on metamodernism (which is post-postmodernism), who seemed to be more lucid than many others; and when I saw this book on Kindle Unlimited, I borrowed it immediately.
Greg Dember uses many grandiose words to explain what metamodernism is. But before that, one has to understand what came first:
The author goes deep into metamodernism- its tropes, methods and paradigms - with plenty of examples from the fields of movies, music, TV shows, literature, philosophy and religion. Since I am still to digest the full import of his analysis, I am stopping this review here - and going back to my world of simple certainties, of partial differential equations and Laplace transforms.
Postscript
By the time I finished the book, I had a nasty cold and fever. So I analysed it from different viewpoints.
1. Traditional: Disease is fate. You'll either survive it, or won't. Pray to God.
2. Modernist: Disease is due to virus. Take the appropriate medicine.
3. Postmodernist: Disease is a human construct. Medicine is part of the colonial narrative.
4. Metamodernist: I feel the disease. Therefore, I will take the appropriate medicine, even while decrying the modernist myth of the grand narrative.
I think that about sums it up.
I started asking erudite young people of my acquaintance to explain the concepts of literary theory to me in words of one syllable. Most of them looked oddly at me and sidled away; some laughed; and some shook their heads pityingly, and wiped away a tear or two. (It apparently seems that anyone trying to understand these concepts unless academically required is viewed as mildly touched in the head.) Then a Gen Z kid among the lot pointed me to a talk by Greg Dember on metamodernism (which is post-postmodernism), who seemed to be more lucid than many others; and when I saw this book on Kindle Unlimited, I borrowed it immediately.
Greg Dember uses many grandiose words to explain what metamodernism is. But before that, one has to understand what came first:
Traditional culture is understood to be about preserving the stability of communal knowledge passed from previous generations and assuring the individual’s place in established social institutions. It is open to very gradual change, but primarily enshrines that which has come before, that which has always been. Artists, storytellers, and wisdom-bearers who operate within this episteme seek to excel according to standards that they learned from their mentors, who learned them from their mentors, and on back, ad infinitum.There! Now let's look at metamodernism.
***
Modernism, in turn, is generally used to indicate the more recent and more specific cultural shift coming in around the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, culminating sometime around the 1950s or early 1960s... If the whole of modernism can be said to have one overarching goal, then it was to expose the untruths that had persisted in human culture due to allegiance to tradition, and replace them with new and “more true” truths, discovered through rationality and fresh vision.
***
Postmodernism, in turn, saw falsehood not only in the traditional beliefs that modernism disrupted, but in any attempt to assert a universal and unquestioned sense of reality, including – of course – the new models put forth under modernism.
Modernism focuses on the thing. Postmodernism is preoccupied with context. Modernism’s power comes from isolating things and looking really closely at them; seeing things as they “really” are; getting to the “bottom” of things. Postmodernism finds that there is always another layer underneath any supposed bottom. That how things really “are” depends on one’s premises and perspective. That everything exists as part of a large system and nothing can be properly understood apart from the system it belongs to.
Ontologically, metamodernism oscillates between the modern and the postmodern. It oscillates between a modern enthusiasm and a postmodern irony, between hope and melancholy, between naïveté and knowingness, empathy and apathy, unity and plurality, totality and fragmentation, purity and ambiguity. Indeed, by oscillating to and fro or back and forth, the metamodern negotiates between the modern and the postmodern. One should be careful not to think of this oscillation as a balance however; rather, it is a pendulum swinging between 2, 3, 5, 10, innumerable poles. Each time the metamodern enthusiasm swings toward fanaticism, gravity pulls it back toward irony; the moment its irony sways toward apathy, gravity pulls it back toward enthusiasm.What I understand is, metamodernism is an attempt to bring some sort of credibility to one's lived experience. It's all very well to say that everything is relative and nothing can be absolutely understood; but what we feel, what we go through, is very real by our perception. So while accepting the fact that our viewpoints are relative and flawed, we also have to accept the fact it is the only surety we have! So metamodernism sort of "swings" between modernism and postmodernism.
The author goes deep into metamodernism- its tropes, methods and paradigms - with plenty of examples from the fields of movies, music, TV shows, literature, philosophy and religion. Since I am still to digest the full import of his analysis, I am stopping this review here - and going back to my world of simple certainties, of partial differential equations and Laplace transforms.
Postscript
By the time I finished the book, I had a nasty cold and fever. So I analysed it from different viewpoints.
1. Traditional: Disease is fate. You'll either survive it, or won't. Pray to God.
2. Modernist: Disease is due to virus. Take the appropriate medicine.
3. Postmodernist: Disease is a human construct. Medicine is part of the colonial narrative.
4. Metamodernist: I feel the disease. Therefore, I will take the appropriate medicine, even while decrying the modernist myth of the grand narrative.
I think that about sums it up.
December 15, 2025
An author seeking to define the current cultural moment has an unenviable task. Unfortunately, Gregory Dember is not up to it.
Dember is quick to disclaim authority: he is not a philosopher, a writer, or a serious artist, only someone interested in all three. That same generic curiosity, however, proves to be the central limitation of the book. What begins as an ambitious attempt to diagnose contemporary culture collapses into a narrow, under-theorized set of preferences elevated to thesis.
In brief, Dember argues that “our culture”, a term he bafflingly never defines, has entered a new era called metamodernism, characterized by an oscillation between modernism’s sincerity and postmodernism’s irony. This framework is not original to Dember; it originates in early-2000s academic work by Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker. Dember’s stated contribution is to extend this idea by enumerating new traits of metamodernism and illustrating them through a series of short essays on artists he believes exemplify the shift.
The problem is not merely that the argument is familiar, but that it is parochial. At no point does Dember specify whether he is describing American culture, the Anglosphere, the West, or something global. Yet the evidence he marshals makes the scope clear enough: “culture,” in this book, appears to be whatever a particular cohort of white indie men were listening to or watching in the late 1990s (see chapters on Elliott Smith, Wes Anderson, Jonathan Richman, among others). Dember shows little curiosity about art outside the narrow slice of his own formative experience—perhaps because engaging seriously with figures like Frank Ocean, Shakira, Oprah Winfrey, Steven Spielberg, Elena Ferrante, or Terrence Malick would strain, if not collapse, the thesis altogether.
Dember anticipates this objection and preemptively deflects it: not every artist, he reminds us, needs to fit the metamodernist mold. But this concession only weakens the project further. What remains is not a theory, but an impressionistic sense that something has shifted. To that, one is tempted to respond that one has only a similarly vague sense that Dember is right.
A more compelling book would have asked different questions entirely. Rather than attempting to periodize culture through a selective canon of favored artists, Dember might have examined what the internet, and now AI, has done to cultural production itself. Authored works consumed as coherent wholes have increasingly given way to algorithmically directed fragments that are endlessly participated in, remixed, and optimized. Questions like "Do we even have a shared culture anymore?" or "What role does the artist play in an attention economy governed by machines?" remain unaddressed. They are, it seems, left to the reader.
Dember is quick to disclaim authority: he is not a philosopher, a writer, or a serious artist, only someone interested in all three. That same generic curiosity, however, proves to be the central limitation of the book. What begins as an ambitious attempt to diagnose contemporary culture collapses into a narrow, under-theorized set of preferences elevated to thesis.
In brief, Dember argues that “our culture”, a term he bafflingly never defines, has entered a new era called metamodernism, characterized by an oscillation between modernism’s sincerity and postmodernism’s irony. This framework is not original to Dember; it originates in early-2000s academic work by Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker. Dember’s stated contribution is to extend this idea by enumerating new traits of metamodernism and illustrating them through a series of short essays on artists he believes exemplify the shift.
The problem is not merely that the argument is familiar, but that it is parochial. At no point does Dember specify whether he is describing American culture, the Anglosphere, the West, or something global. Yet the evidence he marshals makes the scope clear enough: “culture,” in this book, appears to be whatever a particular cohort of white indie men were listening to or watching in the late 1990s (see chapters on Elliott Smith, Wes Anderson, Jonathan Richman, among others). Dember shows little curiosity about art outside the narrow slice of his own formative experience—perhaps because engaging seriously with figures like Frank Ocean, Shakira, Oprah Winfrey, Steven Spielberg, Elena Ferrante, or Terrence Malick would strain, if not collapse, the thesis altogether.
Dember anticipates this objection and preemptively deflects it: not every artist, he reminds us, needs to fit the metamodernist mold. But this concession only weakens the project further. What remains is not a theory, but an impressionistic sense that something has shifted. To that, one is tempted to respond that one has only a similarly vague sense that Dember is right.
A more compelling book would have asked different questions entirely. Rather than attempting to periodize culture through a selective canon of favored artists, Dember might have examined what the internet, and now AI, has done to cultural production itself. Authored works consumed as coherent wholes have increasingly given way to algorithmically directed fragments that are endlessly participated in, remixed, and optimized. Questions like "Do we even have a shared culture anymore?" or "What role does the artist play in an attention economy governed by machines?" remain unaddressed. They are, it seems, left to the reader.
December 2, 2024
Ґреґ Дембер — теоретик, який активно використовує онлайн-платформи для того, щоб поширювати свої погляди на метамодернізм. співредактор (разом з Ліндою Черіелло) сайту whatismetamodern.com, на якому від квітня 2013 каталогізує вияви «метамодерного культурного й естетичного повороту». на цьому сайті він надрукував безліч своїх розборів і рецензій, тоді як на medium - теоретичні статті. найголовніша з них Dember G. After Postmodernism: Eleven Metamodern Methods in the Arts - і саме ці 11 метамодерних методів у різних видах мистецтва він і бере за основу цієї книги (хоча в процесі задіює ще 4).
структура доволі зручна, стиль дуже читабельний: спочатку трохи теорії, потім представлення 11 методів і далі окремі розділи: кіно, серіали, книги, музика, релігія і філософія - і в кожному понад 4 приклади (більшість до цього виходили окремими статтями), в яких Дембер знаходить кілька методів з 11.
з нюансів - він вважає, що іронію винайшли постмодерністи, а також підтримує думку, що Девід Фостер Воллес - не метамодерніст і не представник Нової щирості, а радше провісник і першого, і другого. та й таке.
структура доволі зручна, стиль дуже читабельний: спочатку трохи теорії, потім представлення 11 методів і далі окремі розділи: кіно, серіали, книги, музика, релігія і філософія - і в кожному понад 4 приклади (більшість до цього виходили окремими статтями), в яких Дембер знаходить кілька методів з 11.
з нюансів - він вважає, що іронію винайшли постмодерністи, а також підтримує думку, що Девід Фостер Воллес - не метамодерніст і не представник Нової щирості, а радше провісник і першого, і другого. та й таке.
December 18, 2024
In addition to being a great introduction to metamodernism, Greg Dember's book offers enjoyable analyses of popular songs, books, TV shows, and movies from the past few decades. Prior to reading this book, it had been a while since I had thought much about Death Cab for Cutie, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or Dave Eggers. Who knew that when we all were consuming this content in the early 2000s, we were dipping our toes into a way of seeing that world that is best described as metamodern?
January 23, 2025
Great Dember's book accurately traces the epistemic evolution. It is amazing how he discusses every art form and carefully lays down the metamodern methods seen in art too.
It is easily understandable and I would like that everyone must give it a read, if they want to understand the current cultural condition.
The book cover is absolutely fantastic and the words inside are magical. The book truly has a doubly framed structure which is transcendental.
In a word, BRILLIANT.
It is easily understandable and I would like that everyone must give it a read, if they want to understand the current cultural condition.
The book cover is absolutely fantastic and the words inside are magical. The book truly has a doubly framed structure which is transcendental.
In a word, BRILLIANT.
December 13, 2025
first few chapters defined metamodernism, but most of this book is large media summaries of "metamodern" works. was looking for more about the history / social conditions that lead to metamodernism, this book was more just proving that metamodernism exists
February 2, 2025
While Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin den Akker initiated the discourse on epistemic change, Greg Dember has emerged as a prominent researcher in metamodernism. His first book serves as a beacon of clarity in a world often clouded by confusion surrounding epistemes.
This work provides a comprehensive analysis of the cultural shift and explores various artistic phenomena to illustrate the ongoing metamorphosis.
He uses a clear and concise approach to analyze different works of art and explains how and why the current era is the era of metamodernism.
His essays helped me articulate my feelings during a time when I grappled with the desire to avoid deconstructing everything, as many things still held meaning for me. I wanted to be hopeful but the postmodern discourse kept denying me hope, Dember's essays made sense and his book cleared all of the confusions I had about different epistemes.
His book uses a meta approach to analyze almost everything and find a meaning of hope with a focus on the felt experience, so I urge everyone to read this book.
P.S. The book cover is absolutely brilliant and very thought provoking.
This work provides a comprehensive analysis of the cultural shift and explores various artistic phenomena to illustrate the ongoing metamorphosis.
He uses a clear and concise approach to analyze different works of art and explains how and why the current era is the era of metamodernism.
His essays helped me articulate my feelings during a time when I grappled with the desire to avoid deconstructing everything, as many things still held meaning for me. I wanted to be hopeful but the postmodern discourse kept denying me hope, Dember's essays made sense and his book cleared all of the confusions I had about different epistemes.
His book uses a meta approach to analyze almost everything and find a meaning of hope with a focus on the felt experience, so I urge everyone to read this book.
P.S. The book cover is absolutely brilliant and very thought provoking.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews