Epimodernism

“After postmodernism’s literature of exhaustion, Emmanuel Bouju asks what new life the novel can breathe into the present. Building on Kafka and Calvino, Walter Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze, Bouju ranges freely among a host of contemporary writers, probing their complex revitalization of modernist themes and tropes in ‘a new consistency of literary and artistic discontinuity.’ At once intense and playful, Epimodernism breathes new life into narrative studies today.”

—David Damrosch, Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Comparative Literature, Harvard University

“‘Epi’” – a prefix denoting surface, as well as ‘with’ and ‘among’ – is mobilized here in bold and interesting ways for a vocabulary of literary criticism that skirts the tired ‘isms’ and ‘posts’ of late capitalism’s unraveling.  A true comparatist, Bouju offers six ‘memos,’ each describing a literary epiphenomenon in its travels across multiple languages, traditions and cultural sites. Fromthe sound-values of Kafka’s ‘K,’ which rewrite ‘Amerika’ the world over, to phantom pains and mirror-boxes conserving distant wartime memories, to genetic crossings of biofiction and autofiction, to the crypto-currencies and autopilots of contemporary metanarratives, Epimodernism investigates the byways of aesthetic microworlds hitherto unknown and unauthorized.”

—Emily Apter, Silver Professor of French and Comparative Literature, New York University'

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.

Emmanuel Bouju is Professor of Comparative Literature at Paris 3 La Sorbonne Nouvelle, and a Senior Member of the Institut Universitaire de France.