Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction

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Metamodernism, the Anthropocene, and the

Resurgence of Historicity: Ben Lerner’s 10:04 and
“The Utopian Glimmer of Fiction”

Alison Gibbons

To cite this article: Alison Gibbons (2020): Metamodernism, the Anthropocene, and the
Resurgence of Historicity: Ben Lerner’s 10:04 and “The Utopian Glimmer of Fiction”, Critique:
Studies in Contemporary Fiction, DOI: 10.1080/00111619.2020.1784828

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Published online: 25 Jun 2020.

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CRITIQUE: STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY FICTION
https://doi.org/10.1080/00111619.2020.1784828

Metamodernism, the Anthropocene, and the Resurgence of

Historicity: Ben Lerner’s 10:04 and “The Utopian Glimmer of Fiction”
Alison Gibbons
Department of Humanities, Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield, UK

ABSTRACT
Postmodernism has been characterized by a reductive presentism that sup­
presses historicity and neglects the possibility of the future. If we have seen
a shift from postmodernism to a different cultural logic and structure of
feeling – as, indeed, many critics argue – it, therefore, follows that this may
also entail a new dominant in temporal dynamics. In this article, I take Ben
Lerner’s 2014 novel 10:04 as a case study in literary metamodernism, though
I also make reference to Adam Thirlwell’s 2011 novella Kapow! and Ruth
Ozeki’s 2013 novel A Tale for the Time Being. Across these texts, and primarily
in 10:04 as a quintessentially metamodernist fiction, I observe and explicate
a metamodern temporality characterized, interconnectedly, by the aesthetics
of heterochrony, sideshadowing, and the anticipation of retrospection.
Whilst this temporal dynamic emerges from the precarity and volatility of
experience in the twenty-first century, anthropocenic climate change has
been and remains – I suggest – the greatest catalyst in producing this new
temporal experience which resurrects historicity and resuscitates the future
as a field of possibilities.

. . . while the duration of the real minute and The Clock’s minute were mathematically indistinguishable, they were
nevertheless minutes from different worlds. I watched time in The Clock but I wasn’t in it, or I was experiencing
time as such, not just having experiences through it as a medium. As I made and unmade a variety of overlapping
narratives out of its found footage, I felt acutely how many different days could be built out of a day, felt more
possibility than determinism, the utopian glimmer of fiction.

Ben Lerner, 10:04, p.54

In Ben Lerner’s novel 10:04 (2014), the narrator Ben experiences Christian Marclay’s video artwork
The Clock during its display at the Lincoln Center in New York. The clock is a looped 24-h video
montage, composed of thousands of filmic and televisual sequences of clocks, edited together and
synched with real-time. For Ben, whilst the temporal moment corresponds across his actual experience
and the virtual representation, the ontological fissure between the invented and the real enables
multiple possibilities. These possibilities, he suggests, are potentially and, at least momentarily,
utopian1; most significantly, these possibilities enable awareness of potential agency and future
change. During the novel, Ben’s hipster New York life is disrupted – twice – by the threat of
a catastrophic “superstorm” (222, 240). Such moments of environmental crisis, alongside Ben’s
everyday observations and anxieties about climate change, also evoke this subjective and heterochro­
nic – overlapping, as he says of The Clock – experience of time, in which possible futures generate and
overlay onto possible presents, and future outcomes proliferate.
10:04 has predominantly been read through three critical lenses: as a contemporary autofiction; as
a “weather novel” (Grossman 818) or climate change fiction; and as a distinctly contemporary time-
oriented work, described by Manshell as a “recent historical novel” and by Davies as a “contemporary

CONTACT Alison Gibbons [email protected] Department of Humanities, College of Social Sciences and Arts, Sheffield
Hallam University, Owen Building, City Campus, Howard Street, Sheffield, South Yorkshire, S1 1WB, UK.
© 2020 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
2 A. GIBBONS

‘contemporary’ text (or a ‘meta-contemporary’ text) that reflects (upon) its own relationality to the
time it depicts” (2).2 Although separating discussions of 10:04 into these three optics allows a concise
summary of the novel’s critical reception, 10:04’s engagements with auto-ontological, environmental,
and temporal instabilities are – to continue the visual metaphor – kaleidoscopic or, at least, vitally
interlinked: Narrator Ben is an autofictional counterpart of the Brooklyn-based author Ben Lerner,
whose real existence alongside the novel’s preoccupation with and narrativization of recent crises –
above all, environmental – grounds the fiction in contemporaneous reality whilst regenerating
historicity. Consequently, I assert, 10:04 is a decisively metamodernist text3; its significance rests on
the way it exemplifies the figuration of time in response to life in the Anthropocene as well as in the
cultural context of metamodernism more broadly.
Metamodernism is a designation for the structure of feeling – emerging and coagulating through­
out the first decade of the twenty-first century – which has superseded postmodernism as the
dominant cultural logic in Western capitalist societies.4 It is primarily associated with the cultural
philosophy of Robin van den Akker and Timotheus Vermeulen.5 They draw on Raymond Williams’s
concept of the “structure of feeling,” which they understand as symbolizing “a sentiment, or rather still
a sensibility that everyone shares, that everyone is aware of, but which cannot easily, if at all, be pinned
down. Its tenor, however, can be traced in art, which has the capability to express a common
experience of a time and place” (7).6 Consequently, van den Akker and Vermeulen emphasize that
the dominant collective experience of the twenty-first century differs from that of its postmodern
predecessor, and they cite historical events – such as the Iraq War, 9/11, the 2008 financial crash, the
Arab Spring, and the climate change emergency, amongst others – as external factors that led to this
shift.
Responding to Jameson’s characterization of postmodernism as the waning of affect, depth, and
historicity, Vermeulen and van den Akker therefore “conceive of metamodernism as a structure of
feeling typified by the return of many of these debates, foremost among them History, the grand
narrative, Bildung and the agent” (“Utopia” 55). In Jameson’s account, the consequence of the
poststructuralist perception of language and narrative on the postmodern consciousness is significant:
“If we are unable to unify the past, present, and future of the sentence, then we are similarly unable to
unify the past, present, and future of our own biographical experience and psychic life”
(Postmodernism 27). Postmodern experience is thus reduced to “a series of pure and unrelated
presents in time” (Postmodernism 27). Certainly, the postmodernist preoccupation with senses of
ending, entropic disintegration, and apocalyptic visions of the world’s destruction resulted in reduc­
tive presentism; a blocking out, or forgetting, of the future that ultimately suppressed historicity
(Gibbons, “Entropology” 283–4). As Vermeulen and van den Akker note, even postmodern dystopic
futures generated refracted critiques of the present, “rather than attempts to evoke an image of the
possible future” (“Utopia” 57).
Whilst van den Akker and Vermeulen’s discussions of metamodernism have tended to focus on art
and film, a metamodernist sensibility has also been observed in contemporary literature.7 In this
article, I explore the temporal logic of literary metamodernism, concentrating specifically on the
resurgence of the possible future – or possible futures – and, more generally, historicity in relation to
global warming. Reopening the possibilities of the future is vital for redefining a world after post­
modernism, as Jameson emphasizes (“Future” 76):

I think it would be better to characterize all this in terms of History, a History that we cannot imagine except as
ending, and whose future seems to be nothing but a monotonous repetition of what is already here. The problem
is then how to locate radical difference; how to jumpstart the sense of history so that it again begins to transmit
feeble signs of time, of otherness, of change, of Utopia. The problem to be solved is that of breaking out of the
windless present of the postmodern back into real historical time, and a history made by human beings.

10:04, I suggest, offers a new, metamodernist temporal model, precisely because the narrator’s
experience breaks out of the present. In contrast to a postmodern temporal logic, then, the act of
imagining the possibilities of the future – “how many different days could be built out of a day” – is
 CRITIQUE: STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY FICTION 3

significant because it revivifies an affective sense of reality and human agency. In the next section,
I outline the impact of climate change on historicity in relation to metamodernism. I subsequently
turn to 10:04 as a case study for metamodernist time, though I also make brief reference to two other
contemporary novels – Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being and Adam Thirlwell’s Kapow! – in
order to situate 10:04 as an exemplar for metamodernist fiction and its temporal logic more generally.
Through two foci – the use of Back to the Future as an intertext and the crisis represented by climate
change – my analysis of 10:04 explicates a metamodernist account of time that is heterochronic as well
as anticipatory, bringing back the future and rebooting historicity.

Historicity, Heterochrony, and the Anthropocene

The significance of climate change, Baucom suggests, produces the need to “periodize in relation not
only to capital but to carbon” (125), creating a new world view “measured both in dates and in degrees,
in times and in temperature” (142). Certainly, the cultural rise to dominance of metamodernism
coincides with increasing awareness of the already unstoppable processes of climate change and,
relatedly, general acknowledgment of ‘the Anthropocene’8 – the present geological epoch, in which
humanity’s destructive role and impact on the environment is recognized.9 The influence of climate
change on the contemporary structure of feeling is important since the precarity it evokes is
characteristic not only of individual experience but collective experience in the acknowledgment of
our shared human fate.
The impact of anthroposcenic climate change on contemporary thought and culture is most
evident in the various calls, of scientists and humanities scholars alike, for a resurgence of historical
thinking. As Menely outlines, climate change presents as a “catastrophe – as a unique geological event,
which requires us to recalibrate our philosophies of history and time” (85). He continues, the
“Anthropocene is, after all, a name for a problem of time, of how we perceive, conceptualize, and
give form to temporal heterogeneity in the interface between social systems and planetary systems”
(85). Offering a historian’s perspective, Chakrabarty argues that the collapsed distinction between the
social and the planetary, between culture and nature, evoked by the Anthropocene requires us “to scale
up our imagination of the human” (206): Humans are no longer only biological agents but geological
agents too, and the recorded history of human activity must be repositioned within the larger context
of a deep history of humanity as a planetary species. This is no easy task, as Chakrabarty acknowledges:
“we may not experience ourselves as geological agents, but we appear to have become one at the level
of the species. And without that knowledge that defies historical understanding, there is no making
sense of the current crisis that affects us all” (221). Consequently, he urges, “we can become geological
agents only historically and collectively” (206).
The historical thinking required to understand climate change, in turn, necessitates narrative
thinking; and precisely because anthropocenic narratives call for collective imagination, they are
mythic structures or, in other words, grand narratives.10 Grand narratives of the Anthropocene
fundamentally require future thinking and, resultantly, they have the potential to engender change,
or at least some form of environmental intervention.11 Gare consequently suggests that we move
beyond the distrust associated with postmodernist thinking in order to regenerate grand narratives
that offer new, alternate philosophies of the future, specifically in the service of developing “an
environmentally sustainable civilization” (106).12 Gare has a particular kind of grand narrative in
mind. He proposes: “If we are to confront the global ecological crisis we need to create a new,
polyphonic grand narrative which can do justice to the immanent dynamics and intrinsic significance
of the world and all its participants” (115).13 This grand narrative is not only polyphonic but –
crucially, in terms of this article’s concerns – also polychronic or heterochronic: Gare contends that it
is by “revealing the present as the product of the destructive trajectory of modernity, we can see
ourselves in a crisis” and overcoming this crisis “will require a new vision or visions of the future”
(116). Like Ben in 10:04, then, Gare perceives the utopian potential of imagining various future
possibilities and prospective outcomes.
4 A. GIBBONS

Climate change has become a trope of much contemporary fiction, leading to genre classifications
such as Trexler’s “Anthropocene Fiction.” Mehnert notes both: that climate change “plays out on
a range of timescales, with its most detrimental outcomes lying in the future” (9); and that “past,
present, and future become inseparably intertwined” in climate change fiction (94). In a chapter
focusing specifically on time, Mehnert consequently suggests that climate change fiction rejects the
presentism of postmodernism (94) and instead offers “a timescape perspective that engages in the
temporal aspects of living in a climactically changing world” (97). Whilst Mehnert does not necessarily
seek to periodize or to describe the cultural formations after postmodernism, her remarks that the
temporal structures of and in climate change fiction do not correlate with the simultaneity of
postmodern time lend support to my arguments; both that the Anthropocene acts as a catalyst for
the shift in temporal modes of experience and that this new timescape resonates with a different
cultural logic and emergent structure of feeling, that I align with metamodernism.
In this article, I show that 10:04 – like other metamodernist fictions, particularly those which
engage with climate change – offers a heterochronic model of time and temporality. I have previously –
in my initial account of metamodernist literary style (“Take”) – synthesized ideas from Vermeulen and
van den Akker’s first article on metamodernism and Bourriaud’s mapping of altermodernism: whilst
Vermeulen and van den Akker speak of an impossible but “deliberate being out of time” (12),
Bourriaud articulates an “aesthetics of heterochrony” in which “delay (analogous to the ‘pre-
recorded’) coexists with the immediate (or ‘live’) and with the anticipated” (“Altermodern” 21).
Metamodernist writing thus often entails “an intermixing of temporal chronologies” that generates
an oscillating or coinciding sense of temporality along with hetero- or polychrony (Gibbons, “Take”
33). Since Bourriaud emphasizes heterochrony in relation to composition, Christian Marclay’s The
Clock – and Ben’s experience of it in 10:04 – resonates with these aesthetics. Moreover, not only does
Bourriaud compare this heterochrony to the way “documentary coexists with fiction” as it does in
autofictions like 10:04, he ultimately claims that such ontological and temporal matrices have “the aim
of revealing our present, in which temporalities and levels of reality are intertwined” (21). Such an
effect is palpable in Ben’s account of The Clock, as well as throughout 10:04, and most intensely in
moments when environmental catastrophe comes into view.
Whilst my analysis of 10:04 consequently depicts this metamodernist temporal logic as primarily
shaped by the precarity of the Anthropocene, the poly- or heterochronic restructuring of the timescape
is, undoubtedly, the consequence of a greater and more volatile world-historical moment.
Corresponding with Vermeulen and van den Akker’s discussion of a renewed utopian impulse,
I similarly view the metamodernist reemergence of historicity, its temporal heterochrony, and pro­
liferating possible futures as arising “because we are faced with a radically unstable and uncertain
world, where political systems and power relations are diffuse and unpredictable, financial security
a rare privilege and ecological problems – sometimes quite literally – clog the horizon” (“Utopia” 57).
I now turn to 10:04, introducing the novel’s pre-occupation with time through its intertextual
connection with Back to the Future and positioning this in the context of lived experience in the
Anthropocene.

Back to the Future, Anthropocenic Historicity, and Heterochrony in 10:04

The title of 10:04 references the 1985 film Back to the Future, which is narrator Ben’s “favorite movie”
(111) and a significant intertext of the book. In Back to the Future, 10:04 is the time at which lightning
strikes the Hill Valley Court House, freezing the clock’s time. For Marty McFly, it takes on numerous
significances: in 1985, Marty remembers the 10:04 of the clock tower as a significant past-event yet once
transported into 1955, he anticipates the 10:04 lightning strike as a moment of radical possibility in
which he will be able to time-travel back to the future. Temporal multiplicity is also present in the title
of Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being, wherein the phrase “time being” signals both a transitory
present moment as well as the deep-scale and scope of humanity, that is “someone who lives in time,
and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or ever will be” (Ozeki 3). Manshel
 CRITIQUE: STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY FICTION 5

reads the titles of both novels as encoding contingency (2017, n.p) whilst Katz speaks of 10:04’s title as
signifying Lerner’s commitment to “modes of futurity” (2017: 325). I add that since the Hill Valley
clock of Back to the Future is frozen and the time itself becomes a heterochronic reference point, 10:04
also represents a perpetual stutter: 10:04 is atemporal, existing across temporalities and, as such,
gestures toward a conception of time that connects particular moments (e.g. 1955, 1985) to a longer
durée. This makes a fitting parallel with anthropocenic narratives in which the recorded time of
human history must be contextualized within the deeper time of species thinking and planetary
evolution.
The pivotal moment in Back to the Future is extracted and incorporated into Christian Marclay’s
The Clock. In 10:04, when Ben recounts his viewing of The Clock, he also reveals, “(I had wanted to
arrive by 10:04 to see the lightning strike the courthouse clock tower in Back to the Future, allowing
Marty to return to 1985, but Alex couldn’t get a train back from her mother’s in time.)” (52). On one
hand, because this admission is presented in parenthesis as part of the speaker-now of narration, it is
out-of-time with the narrated events. On the other hand, it inscribes multiple temporalities: the
narrator’s wish is presented in past perfect tense (“had wanted”) to position his infinitive viewing of
Back to the Future (“to arrive,” “to see”) in an anterior domain of unfulfilled optimism; the force of
lightning and Marty McFly’s time-traveling is manifested through simple present (“strike”) and
present continuous (“allowing”); yet all of this is negated and placed in the conditional past when
Alex’s delay (“couldn’t get”) prevents the narrator’s hopes from being realized “in time” – an
expression that, in itself, signals both temporal urgency and temporal grounding. Ben, therefore,
expresses his anticipatory hopes in retrospect and even though he doesn’t watch the Back to the Future
scene in The Clock, the vivid possibility of his doing so is nevertheless felt through the simultaneity of
present tense forms. Investigating the manifestation of the aesthetics of heterochrony in linguistic
style, I have previously suggested that “[i]n metamodernist writing, heterochrony is often created
through frequent temporal deictic shifts (e.g. changes in tense)” (“Take” 33). As my analysis here
reveals, Lerner’s prose enacts such heterochronic temporality. This shows the ways in which, as Katz
puts it, 10:04 is “concerned throughout with how the horizon of this future, itself unrealisable, is at the
same time the single most determining factor dictating how we live every ‘present’ we inhabit” (325).
The present moment appears heterochronic because our imagined projections into possible futures
(hopeful, or otherwise) refract back into and open up our lived experiences.
Crucially, the time-traveling enabled at 10:04 in Back to the Future’s 1955 is brought about by the
force of lightning: time-traveling is possible, in O’Dell’s words, only if Doc and Marty McFly “harness
the catastrophic storm’s power” (450). In 10:04, New York faces two superstorms: Hurricane Irene
(which struck in August 2011) in the novel’s opening and Hurricane Sandy (in late October 2012) at its
close. The plot of Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being also engages with the global environment: the
narrative stretches across the pacific ocean, alternating between chapters narrated by the autofictional
“Ruth” in Canada and a fictional character called Nao in Japan whom, Ruth worries, may not have
survived the 2011 Tsunami.14 The structures of both 10:04 and A Tale for the Time Being, therefore,
highlight the deep-scale impact of natural forces on small-scale narratives of human experience.
Extreme weather events – such as a Tsunami in A Tale for the Time Being and superstorms in
10:04 – act as palpable events that extend our sense of history by bringing the intangible scope of
climate change, however briefly, into focus.
Manshel claims, the “nonfictional, precisely datable, eventness” of Hurricanes Irene and Sandy in
10:04 and the tsunami in A Tale for the Time Being serve to revivify, and ground the narratives in,
historical time (Manshell n.p; cf. O’Dell 3 4). Events such as this also ground the narrative in a reality
that the autofictional author-character shares with real readers. A significant proportion of
Anthropocene fiction is science-fictive, fantastical, or set in the future,15 presumably because the
Anthropocene figures the future so apocalyptically. However, in her study of climate change fiction
and time, Mehnert discusses two novels set in “the near future and thus the temporal horizon of their
contemporary readers”; this proximal temporal horizon means that “in countering the assumption
that climate change is something that will take place in the far-off future, the novels become attuned to
6 A. GIBBONS

a different dimension: environmental time” (124). In contrast, both because of what Manshel calls its
“datableness” and because of its autofictional dimension, Ben Lerner’s 10:04 reflects on the environ­
mental crisis from what was the author’s present, which subsequently exists as the 2011–12 past for
readers. As such, the framing of the fiction with two historical hurricanes not only casts 10:04 as an
autofictional account of life on “a warming planet” (Lerner 7); it positions Ben’s anxieties as already
part of a reader’s past and present. The future possibility of environmental apocalypse is thus made to
feel more meaningful to readers and consequently, that possible future installs a sense of environ­
mental time into readers’ own present reality.

Opening up the Future through Sideshadowing

The hurricanes of 10:04 – as events of environmental crisis – play a significant role in the book’s
metamodernist model of time. As Malm notes: “The protagonist sinks into obsession with temporality, as
he ruminates over what he believes to be the source of all these storms: climate change” (3). I suggest that
such moments of potential environmental crisis generate a temporal experience that Morson refers to as
sideshadowing – “a concept of time as a field of possibilities” (119; original emphasis) or “an open
universe” (118). For example, whilst waiting for both Hurricanes Irene and Sandy to pass, Ben and his
close female friend Alex watch Back to the Future. Here is how Ben describes the latter event (230):
. . . we got into bed and projected Back to the Future onto the wall; it could be our tradition for once-in-a-generation
weather, I’d suggested to Alex . . . Branches scraped against the windows, casting their shadows in the 1980s, the
1950s; a couple of plastic trash cans were blown down the street, and rain hit the skylight hard enough to sound like
hail. By the time the storm made landfall, Marty was teaching Chuck Berry how to play rock and roll in the past,
which meant that, when he got back to the future, white people would have invented, not appropriated, that musical
form; I spent a few minutes describing this ideological mechanism to Alex before I realized she was asleep. I drifted
off too, and when I woke I walked to the window; it was still raining hard, but the yellow of the streetlamps revealed
a mundane scene; a few large branches had fallen, but no trees. We never lost power. Another historic storm had
failed to arrive, as though we lived outside of history or were falling out of time.

Ben’s proposal that watching Back to the Future could be a “tradition for once-in-a-generation weather”
is both ironic and poignant, precisely because the act recalls Ben’s experience of the first storm so closely:
Accompanied by a sleeping Alex, he watched the film whilst Hurricane Irene circled by (22–24), also
undramatically since similarly “a few branches had fallen, but no trees” (24). Rather than occurring once
approximately every hundred years, hurricane activity is intensifying because of climate change. In fact,
Lerner’s novel makes this explicit. The narrator quips: “For the second time in a year, we were facing
once-in-a-generation weather” (213). Ben emphasizes the strangeness of this recurrence through repeti­
tion, in both instances anticipating the storms with the same statement: “An unusually large cyclonic
system with a warm core was approaching New York” (16, 213). And in case there were any doubt that
the increasing frequency of such extreme weather is characteristic of life in the Anthropocene, one of
Ben’s agitated graduate students frantically demands, “Do you want to tell me these storms aren’t man
made . . . ?” (219). Just as anthropocenic precarity is a key player in the metamodernist reboot of
historicity and grand narratives, in 10:04 it is an urgent anxiety which affects Ben’s experience of time,
and particularly the heterochrony of the present and its possible futures.
Ben’s visual projection of Back to the Future during Hurricane Sandy also projects and interjects
temporalities. Tree branches from the actual world of 2012 infringe into the fictionalized pasts of the
movie (the 1980s, the 1950s) whilst Marty’s ideologically loaded cover version of Chuck Berry’s
“Johnny B. Goode” – a simulacral replacement of the original – becomes co-temporal with the storm’s
arrival (through the adverbial “By the time the storm made landfall”). As O’Flynn wittily writes:
“While there is no flux capacitor in Lerner’s novel, there is a multiplicity of pasts, presents and futures”
(2015: n.p). However, this multiplicity – the heterochrony as well as the ontological realms it cuts
through – is actually a vital distinction between the temporal models of Back to the Future and 10:04,
as well as their expressions of postmodern sensibility and metamodernist structure of feeling,
respectively.
 CRITIQUE: STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY FICTION 7

In postmodernist thinking, as Brown articulates: “History is figured less as a stream linking past and
future than as a cluttered and dynamic field of eruptions, forces, emergences, and partial formations.
As the discontinuities and lack of directional laws in history are pushed to the foreground, history is
spatialized – conceptually wrenched from temporal ordering” (116–7). In postmodernism, time was
reconfigured as space (Harvey 1989); in Back to the Future, you can travel through time as a spatialized
landscape, if you reach 88 miles per hour.16 Furthermore, and specifically citing Back to the Future,
Booker claims that “the fascination with time travel (almost always involving travel into the past) in
postmodern film might be taken as a sign of this same sort of loss of historical sense” (69). This is, in
effect, the point Lerner makes when he describes how, in Back to the Future, Marty’s siblings fade from
a family photograph and Marty’s own hand begins to vanish (9). Both of these events in the movie
come about because Marty’s presence in 1955 endangers his own – and his siblings’ – existence when
he interferes with his parents’ first meeting and his mother instead becomes romantically attached to
him. In Lerner’s words, “Marty’s time-travelling disrupts the prehistory of his family” (9) and Marty’s
own erasure illustrates “the absence of the future” (10).
One might argue that the future does exist in Back to the Future; but even so that future is reduced
to text – it is written, rewritten, and defined by past actions. Indeed, Morson reads Back to the Future
as a plot governed by what, in contrast, he calls foreshadowing, which “indicates backward causality”
(48): In the film, “a journey to the past allows for action that will make the existing present cease to be,
though we know it has ‘already happened’” (70). The photograph of Marty and his brother and sister
are evidence of this: “the image held in one’s hands alters because of events that will happen – or we
might better say, that will have happened – later” (Morson 70). Ultimately, then, in Back to the Future
as a postmodern film, “the future is already there and ineluctable; but somehow the sequence itself is
not ineluctable, providing one can travel through time” (Morson 70). It might, therefore, seem as
though Marty can intervene in history but this agency is illusory. In fact, foreshadowing “seems utterly
to preclude the possibility of options” (Morson 49); in Back to the Future, the tangible present effect
(faded images and body parts) evidences the prescribed inevitability of the future.
In contrast, 10:04 is driven by sideshadowing (117–172) and, relatedly, by what Currie calls the
anticipation of retrospection (the latter of which is discussed in the next section).17 In sideshadowing,
“two or more alternative presents, the actual and the possible, are made simultaneously visible. This is
a simultaneity not in time but of times: we do not see contradictory actualities, but one possible that
was actualized and, at the same moment, another that could have been but was not” (Morson 118;
original emphasis). These temporal sentiments are resonant when “Ben” laments, “[a]nother historic
storm had failed to arrive, as though we lived outside of history or were falling out of time” (230). Even
though Hurricane Sandy hasn’t materialized in Ben’s physical environment, he characterizes it with
temporal significance as “historic.” Moreover, a heterochrony of tenses co-occur: the historic storm is
subject to both anterior time through the past-perfect “had failed” and infinitive possibility in “to
arrive”; similarly, whilst Ben’s lived experience is conditional (“as though”); he conceives of it as past
(“lived”) and past progressive/imperfect (“were falling”).
Lerner is not alone in opening up the timescape to heterochronous possibilities. In A Tale for the
Time Being, Ruth considers how Possible Worlds Theory allows for multiple presents as a means of
abating her uncertainty over Nao’s fate precisely because she “cares whether [Nao is] dead or alive in
this world” (400); the proximal deictics of “this world” prioritizing the actual whilst also comparing it
to its possible sideshadow. Additionally, the narrator of Adam Thirlwell’s Kapow! – who also
resembles the author18 – discloses: “I realized that for the first time I was imagining a story when
the backstories were basically invisible, and so was the ending – because it was happening right in front
of me. But this didn’t mean, of course, that the backstories didn’t exist. They existed as always. Just as
the ending existed, somewhere, in an absent future” (31). He adds that in his “new theory of language
as a trampoline, they [backstories and endings] were there already because they were just side-effects
of syntax” (31). These “side-effects” are akin to sideshadows, influencing the narrator’s ongoing
present experience. Temporal potentialities are thus re-opened in metamodernist fiction through
characters’ felt sense of possible futures and the heterochronic present.
8 A. GIBBONS

The Anticipation of Retrospection and the Potentialities of the Future

In About Time, Currie investigates the philosophical relationship between time and narrative. Even
though narrative “is understood as retrospection more readily than it is understood as anticipation,”
he writes, “it cannot really be one without the other. If, in order to look back at what has happened, we
tell a story, we must also know that the present is a story to be told” (5). This means that “the present is
the object of a future memory, and we live it as such, in anticipation of the story we will tell later,
envisaging the present as past” (5). Currie elaborates in his subsequent discussion of the unexpected,
which he describes as “a little bit of the future installed in the present. It is not the actual future, but an
envisaged, virtual future which is part of the present, experiencing the present moment as one that will
have been, as something that will have happened” (Unexpected 63; original emphasis). Whilst this may
appear similar to foreshadowing – particularly because these italicized modal verb phrases echo
Morson’s discussion – it crucially differs. Instead, “retrospect is virtual, envisaged, predicted in tandem
with the event concerned” (Unexpected 71). The anticipation of retrospection therefore instead
resembles sideshadowing because, rather than the future being predestined and channeling back to
the present, the anticipated future is imagined and provisional as is the retrospective impression of the
present that it creates. To return to Lerner’s words in this article’s epigraph, the anticipation of
retrospection induces “more possibility than determinism, the utopian glimmer of fiction” (54).
Moreover, the anticipated future manifests not as an actual effect in the present but as an experience
or, in other words, an affective effect.
Bilmes has also noted these temporal dynamics in 10:04, focusing on “Lerner’s project of writing
memory in a media-saturated age” (4). Whilst my thinking coincides with Bilmes's discussion in terms
of identifying these temporal structures in 10:04, our arguments are by no means identical. Bilmes
focuses on sideshadowing as “the narrator’s way of critiquing our contemporary sense of time, a sense
fostered by digital mnemotechnologies and the pervasive soup of stories wherein much of our
consciousness is daily immersed” (16). Although he sees sideshadowing and the anticipation of
retrospection as peculiarly contemporary, he only intimates that this temporal structure is related to
a cultural account that is beyond the postmodern.19 In contrast, I argue that sideshadowing is not only
Ben’s subjective narrative strategy but a fundamental experience of life in the anthropocene and
characteristic of metamodernist temporality more generally. Moreover, whilst Bilmes’s argument
concentrates on the retroactive dimension of narrating the self,20 I see heterochrony and the field of
potentialities generated by sideshadowing as the essential axes on which an affective sense of agency
and future intervention are made possible. In relation to the first distinction, the two hurricanes in
10:04 are key in bringing possible futures into view. Preparing for the first, Hurricane Irene, Ben
finds – in the atmosphere of New York – “the air excited by foreboding” (18) and, as he and Alex buy
emergency supplies, he notices that “the approaching storm was estranging the routine of shopping”
(19). The epigraph for 10:04 ends with the words, “Everything will be as it is now, just a little different”
(1),21 words that become a resonant refrain throughout the novel. Lerner repeats them, too, in
recounting his commercial preparations for Hurricane Irene: “Everything will be as it is now, just
a little different – nothing in me or the store had changed . . . but, as the eye [of the storm] drew near,
what normally felt like the only possible world became one among many, its meaning everywhere up
for grabs, however briefly” (19; original emphasis). In his reading of 10:04, Bilmes highlights that “a
moment of anticipated danger seems to open up the future” (13) but, crucially, the anticipated threat is
a superstorm, specifically Hurricane Irene, and by extension the cataclysmic catastrophe of climate
change that it represents.
Ben initially and mistakenly thinks that the outcomes of the storms are known. This is hardly
surprising since “a million media, most of them handheld” forewarn and track Hurricane Irene, “a
threat viewable from space, an aerial sea monster with a single-centered eye around which tentacular
rain bands swirled” (17). Even Morson cites a storm as an instance of foreshadowing: “The storm is
there because the catastrophe follows: it is an effect of that future catastrophe visible in temporal
advance” (48). However, even though, before he falls asleep, Ben sees the “shadows of the trees
 CRITIQUE: STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY FICTION 9

bending in the increasing wind” (22), he wakes to the “failure of the storm” (24), “downgraded before
landfall” (23), and leaving little visible impact. On the eve of Hurricane Irene, Ben and Alex experience
a new tenderness – potentially romantic – in their relationship. Afterward, Ben considers (24):
. . . whatever physical intimacy had opened up between us had dissolved with the storm; even that relatively
avuncular gesture would be strange for both of us now. More than that: it was as though the physical intimacy
with Alex, like the sociability with strangers or the aura around objects, wasn’t just over, but retrospectively
erased. Because those moments had been enabled by a future that had never arrived, they could not be
remembered from this future that, at and as the present, had obtained; they’d faded from the photograph.

As Bilmes notes about this passage, “[s]tating that these past moments (of tangible presence made
possible by anticipated danger) have been ‘retrospectively erased’ and ‘could not be remembered’ is
nonsensical, in narrative terms,” yet it contains some “phenomenological truth” (13). Ben may claim
that because the envisaged future does not come to pass, the evidence of what was the current
moment – as in Back to the Future – will have faded or been erased. Nevertheless, that imagined
future evidently leaves an experiential imprint. As in Morson’s theory, “sideshadowing suggests that
even unactualized possibilities somehow leave their mark on history” (120).
For Bilmes, this mark appears to be the crucial effect of self-narration, “the experience of living the
present moment as a future memory” (16). However – and demonstrating the second distinction
between Bilmes’s argument and my own – if the ultimate effect of sideshadowing is “the always
retrospective promise of narrative as a vital technology for personal memory” (Bilmes 19), its
potentiality is somewhat limited – limited, that is, to the individual’s self-narration rather than utilized
for collective intervention. In my reading of 10:04, although Ben and Alex did not progress their
physical intimacy, their anticipation of the storm did unlock an unexpected moment in their present
experience, and crucially that unexpected moment had the potential to become actual. In such
moments wherein possible futures come into view, the retrospective projection of these futures not
only opens the present up to heterochrony; our experiences of both the actualized and unactualized
possibilities allow us to conceive of how we might act differently, both in the moment and moving
forward toward these futures. In this way, and particularly in moments of environment crisis that
bring the Anthropocene into focus, sideshadowing and the anticipation of retrospection revivify
(rather than only foreclose) both individual and collective senses of our historical agency.
The many futures or sideshadows present in metamodernist fiction importantly allow inquiry not
only into possible futures – utopian, dystopian, and all manner in between – but also into how the
present might be, in Lerner’s words, “as it is now, just a little different” (1, 19) or, in Thirlwell’s, “new
and not new, simultaneously [. . .] the same but different” (21). Thirlwell’s narrator, in fact, outlines
a more explicit account of sideshadowing or the anticipation of retrospection, asserting: “You can only
understand a story once it’s over, at the end. Inside the roller coaster, you’re nothing. So you have to
imagine that you’re out of it, if you want to understand what a mess you’re in. You have to turn
yourself inside out or back to front or upside down. You have to manage this gorgeous acrobatic feat of
looking in every direction” (71). Crucially, just like Ben in 10:04, the narrator of Kapow! emphasizes
the act of imagining, a psychic projection into a possible future that enables us to grasp the meaning of,
and potential agency in, our present experience. The narrator of Kapow! also insists on the polychrony
or heterochrony of these narrative moments (72):
if a story’s extended in one direction then it might mean that the story was being extended the other way – and
that the story you thought was real, in which all the other stories were contained, was in fact – like, wham! – part
of another story, of which you knew nothing. Just as the reader is part of a story, of which the reader knows
nothing. It all depends, after all, on what you think is magical.

The reference to magic once again intimates the power of imagination whilst, by gesturing toward the
reader, Kapow!’s narrator implies the extra-fictional and collective significance of this kind of future
thinking. Moreover, the narrator’s exclamatory “wham!” expresses, like Ben’s sensation of a faded or
erased experience in 10:04, the affective impact of the envisaged future failing to arrive and its potential
for change. Indeed, Morson describes the effects of sideshadowing: “It is as if one possibility out of
10 A. GIBBONS

many became actual but carried another as a sort of recessive gene, invisible to the eye but capable of
affecting future generations” (120).
While Back to the Future is Ben’s favorite film, “one of [his] favorite paintings” is Jules Bastien-
Lepage’s Joan of Arc (9). In the picture, Joan stands in the foreground – apparently at the bequest of
angels – and extends out her left arm. Her outstretched hand “seems to dissolve” (Lerner, 9). In
contrast to Marty’s self-erasure by the future, Joan is “being pulled into the future,” and a future that
seems to manifest as “a presence, not an absence” (9). For Ben, rather than angels, it seems to be
climate change anxiety that acts as the principal prospective pull on his temporal experience. Not only
do the two storms trigger his anticipation of retrospection, but throughout the novel, he emphasizes
his anthropocenic experience, chiefly the “unseasonable warmth” and his visions of a “sinking”
New York soon to be “underwater”:

“unseasonable warmth” (3)

“unseasonably warm December afternoon” (32)
“The unusual heat felt summery, but the light was distinctly autumnal” (63)
“It was still unseasonably warm but there was now an implication of winter in the air” (66)
“ . . . it was unseasonably warm” (107)
“It was an unseasonably warm day” (153)
“The thin winter air was cool but unseasonably warm; it was probably in the forties” (164)
“You can say it’s all a hoax and walk out into the unseasonable warmth . . . ” (206)
“Outside it was still just unseasonably warm . . . ” (213)
“ . . . I walked up Fourth Avenue toward Sunset Park, sweating profusely in the unseasonable humidity” (221)
“It was a sunny, unseasonably warm day” (231)
“ . . . in the sinking city” (4)
“ . . . a future I increasingly imagined as underwater” (40)
“ . . . the city would soon be underwater” (153)

Like Roberto, the eight-year-old child whom Ben tutors, Ben tends “to figure the global apocalypti­
cally” (14); necessarily and relatedly, through his lived experience in the Anthropocene, he seems to
figure one of the possible anticipated futures of the present apocalyptically too. Perhaps this is why,
whilst 10:04 is supposedly the novel written by the autofictional Ben (237), the book Ben co-creates
with Roberto is titled “To The Future” (221, 225), the preposition ambiguously saluting the future’s
magnitude as well as hurtling toward it. Roberto’s book is actually about how the brontosaurus species
turns out never to have existed, but was brought into being by an error in which paleontologists
thought the skull of a camarasaurus matched the skeletal body of an apatosaurus. The dinosaur thus
becomes a metaphor for the experience of sideshadowing or the anticipation of retrospection, since
many people “still think there is a dinosaur called the brontosaurus” (229).
Roberto, though, is concerned not so much by the story of the dinosaur or the book that he and
Ben have produced. Instead he, too, is worried about the oncoming superstorm, in this instance
Hurricane Sandy, and its impact on essential resources. Ben attempts to comfort him: “Almost half
of humanity will face water scarcity by 2030, but I assured him he had no reason to worry, and
tried to refocus his attention on the high production value of our own study of extinction” (222).
Although Ben’s description of the book as “our own study of extinction” contextually indicates To
the Future, given Ben's and Roberto’s shared anxieties about the effects of global warming, the
phrase also seems to signify human life in the Anthropocene. As such, parallels are drawn between
the fate of the dinosaurs and the precarity and providence of humans as a species. Heterochrony,
sideshadowing, and the anticipation of retrospection in 10:04 bring possible futures of the
Anthropocene into view; in doing so, the present is imbued with the uneasy aftershock of these
future images whereby it feels as though humans – as with Marty McFly’s hand and like the image
of him and his siblings in his photograph – are being retrospectively erased, fading from history. It
is the affective imprint of this possible future that has the potential to prompt us to change the way
we live in the present and influence the future ahead.
 CRITIQUE: STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY FICTION 11

To the Future; for Now

In this article, I have argued that metamodernist fictions feature a temporal logic distinct from
postmodernist simultaneity, presentism, and the absent future. Specifically, this new metamodernist
model of time resurrects historicity and resuscitates the future as a field of possibilities. Jameson
observes (“Future” 77):

. . . a breaking of the sound barrier of History is to be achieved in a situation in which the historical imagination is
paralysed and cocooned, as though by a predator’s sting: no way to burst through into the future, to reconquer
difference, let alone Utopia, except by writing yourself into it, but without turning back. It is the writing that is the
battering ram, the delirious repetition that hammers away at this sameness running through all the forms of our
existence . . .

Narrative forms of imagination – telling stories, literary writing, grand narratives – are a crucial
vehicle for a more productive model of time that allows us, as individuals and collectively, to
regain a sense of our own agency in the contemporary world. Metamodernist temporality is
characterized, interconnectedly, by the aesthetics of heterochrony, sideshadowing, and the antici­
pation of retrospection. I have shown this temporal logic to be at work in Ben Lerner’s 10:04, as
well as other metamodernist fictions such as Adam Thirlwell’s Kapow! and Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for
the Time Being. It is not, however, a leap to extrapolate from the temporal dynamics of these
literary works to the overarching structure of feeling that metamodernism represents. Indeed,
Currie suggests that if “we scale [the anticipation of retrospection] up from the individual toward
the collectivity of an epoch, we have a similar structure which is, similarly, a quasi-temporal self-
reflection: a lived experience of the historical present which walks pari passu with its future
memory” (Unexpected 63; original emphasis).
The Anthropocene and the reengagement with grand narrative thinking it entails, is –
I maintain – a chief catalyst in the emergence of the metamodern temporality that is observable
in contemporary fiction. As Malm proclaims: “History has sprung alive, through a nature that has
done likewise” (11). Horton suggests that, in 10:04, “the artistic reconfiguration of historical time
and the projection of alternate futures currently unavailable enables a sense of hope or promise
regarding art’s potential for social transformation, even in the context of large-scale socio-
economic division and environmental catastrophe” (321). This sense of hope, I think, is co-
existent with each alternate future’s possible imprint on the historical present: the contemporary
now becomes “an actual present alive with multiple futures” (Lerner, 194) and we feel “acutely how
many days could be built out of a day” (54).
In 10:04’s opening, and after discussing his proposed novel with his agent, Ben hypothesizes: “I’ll
project myself into several futures simultaneously,” I should have said, “a minor tremor in my hand;
I’ll work my way from irony to sincerity in the sinking city” (4). In doing so, he not only presents his
future projections as contextualized acts in the precarious and vulnerable epoch of the
Anthropocene, even his words are formed through the anticipation of retrospection – that is, “I
should have said.” Moreover, Ben’s fantastical trembling hand subjects him to similar ontological
and chronological glitches as Back to the Future’s Marty McFly and Bastien-Lepage’s Joan of Arc:
there is “a tension between the metaphysical and physical worlds, between two orders of tempor­
ality, producing a glitch in the pictorial matrix” (9). According to Baucom, “the anthropocene is
more than a name for a new chronology, more than a new set of historical dates”; rather, “this new
supra-, ultra-, or extra-historical moment we inhabit is one that is again composed of multiple
scales, orders, and classes of time (abstract, hermeneutic, optic) and multiple corresponding
orientations to the possibility of the (just) future fashioning of those times” (142). Ben Lerner’s
10:04 manifests exactly this heterochrony because – as those of us living in the Anthropocene know
and in Ben’s appropriately glitched words (glitched, because Ben is, in fact, prosopopoeically voicing
Ronald Reagan’s famous expression) – “the future doesn’t belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to
the brave” (16).
12 A. GIBBONS

Notes
1. Of course, since they are multiple, some could equally be dystopian.
2. On 10:04 as: an autofiction, see Gibbons “Autonarration”; as a climate change fiction, see De Bruyn; Grossman;
Malm; Tsitsovits and Vermeulen; and for discussions of its temporality, see; Bilmes; Clare; Davies; Katz; Manshel;
O’Dell; Vermeulen.
3. It is read as an exemplar of metamodernist fiction by: van den Akker, Gibbons, and Vermeulen; Gibbons
“Postmodernism”.
4. Metamodernism is by no means the only such designation for what critics see as the shift in contemporary
aesthetics away from postmodernism. Rudrum and Stavris’ edited collection Supplanting the Postmodern gathers
key essays of other existing accounts of the cultural formations after postmodernism. Nevertheless, metamodern­
ism appears to have gained the most critical traction.
5. van den Akker and Vermeulen first used the term in their 2010 article (Vermeulen and van den Akker, “Notes”)
and later developed their ideas with a greater emphasis on historicity in their introduction to Metamodernism:
Historicity, Affect, and Depth after Postmodernism. It is also worth noting that there are preceding uses of the term
“metamodernism” (see Dumitrescu; Furlani; Zavarzadeh) though these are seen to have differing emphases (van
den Akker and Vemeulen 4–5).
6. Raymond Williams outlined his conception of the structure of feeling in his 1954 essay “Film and the Dramatic
Tradition”.
7. I have previously discussed metamodernism as exemplified in contemporary fiction (see: “Take”, “Postmodernism”,
“Contemporary Autofiction”, and “Entropology”). Another influential account of literary metamodernism comes
from James and Seshagiri but this focuses on the revitalization of modernism in contemporary literature and, as
such, is somewhat at odds with Vermeulen and van den Akker’s (as well as my own) sense of metamodernism,
which entails an “oscillation” between the styles of modernism and postmodernism.
8. Crutzen first postulated and coined the term “the Anthropocene”. However, his article in Nature was published
after his co-written account of the Anthropocene (Crutzen and Stoermer).
9. Notably, the concept of the Anthropocene already interconnects natural and cultural worlds (for instance, see Clark).
Furthermore, van den Akker and Vermeulen relate the metamodern world-historical, socio-political cultural moment
to the Anthropocene, by describing a situation “in which wealth is concentrated at the top 1% of the pyramid, while
rising sea levels and super storms crumble its base, where the rest of us reside in highly precarious conditions” (14). I,
too, have elsewhere identified climate change as “a contributing component within a more complex configuration of
contemporary crises . . . that together, relatedly, engender a new cultural sensibility” (“Entropology” 3).
10. Bonneuil argues that scientific accounts of the anthropocene, such as Crutzen’s original outline, show this
collective narrativity through the prominent use of lexemes such as “we” and “humanity” (indeed, this is
evidently true of Chakrabarty’s writing discussed above). Bonneuil identifies four prevalent grand narratives of
the anthropocene which he refers to as: (1) the naturalistic narrative; (2) the post-nature narrative; (3) the eco-
catastrophic narrative; and (4) the eco-Marxist narrative.
11. Postmodernism’s prior hostility and incredulity toward the grand narrative (Lyotard 1984) left us, according to
Gare, “suspicious of all totalizing visions of history” (Gare 106) but – in the context of accelerating climate
change – this suspicion has “been disastrous” (107). Gare, therefore, advocates the politico-ethical potential of
grand narratives because they enable us “to envisage new possibilities for the future” (106). Similarly, Bonneuil
writes, “the kind of stories we tell ourselves today about the Anthropocene can shape the kind of historical future
we will inhabit” (17).
12. Corsa has explicitly proposed that Gare’s advocacy of the grand narrative as a hopeful intervention, and the
resurgence of grand narratives more generally, is inescapably metamodern (258–268).
13. Gare’s thinking here is inspired by Bakhtin’s discussion of the multitudinous complexion – of voices, con­
sciousnesses, and worlds – of polyphony.
14. Caracciolo discusses the relationship between the novel’s plot and oceanography.
15. Indeed, such Anthropocene fiction is numerous and significant enough for Bloom’s neologism “cli-fi” to have
gained currency in mainstream literary discourse. As a journalist, Dan Bloom claims to have coined “cli-fi” as
a short genre descriptor that “could fit easily into newspaper and magazine headlines” (in interview with; Brady).
16. Ní Fhlainn observes that Back to the Future not only presents a very “localised sense of time travel, in that, time
travel and its effects is explicitly limited to Hill Valley” (179), but that time is also “fleeting and dangerous,
something to be chased and manipulated” (177).
17. For another discussion of these temporal dynamics in 10:04, see Bilmes. Although Bilmes and I agree that
sideshadowing and the anticipation of retrospect are at work in Lerner’s novel, Bilmes primarily reads the novel’s
temporal structure as a dynamic of subjective remembrance in which, through narrative acts, past experience can
be reinvented (as outlined in Bilmes 4–5).
18. Unlike “Ruth” and “Ben”, the narrator of Kapow! is anonymous/unnamed. However, the narrator references two
previous books which, through likeness to Adam Thirlwell’s own back catalog, allow a reading of the narrator as
a counterpart of the author (Thirlwell 10).
 CRITIQUE: STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY FICTION 13

19. Bilmes writes: “This new experience of time is one whereby the future tense is becoming (and arguably has been
becoming since the heydey of postmodernism) increasingly dominant both in culture and philosophical critiques
of culture” (2).
20. For instance, Bilmes argues, “Ben’s sideshadowing of his past self’s present with the future pull of anticipated
events thus demonstrates how the future comes to exercise its ‘presence’, or how it somehow presences itself not
only in moments of present expectation, but also in moments of retrospective narration” (16).
21. 10:04’s epigraph is purportedly taken from Giorgio Agamben’s The Coming Community. For a discussion of the
relationship between 10:04 and Agamben’s thinking, see Davies.

Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor
Alison Gibbons is Reader in Contemporary Stylistics at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. She is the author of
Multimodality, Cognition, and Experimental Literature (Routledge, 2021), and co-editor of Mark Z. Danielewski
(Manchester University Press, 2011), Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature (Routledge, 2012),
Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, and Depth after Postmodernism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), and Pronouns in
Literature: Positions and Perspectives in Language (Palgrave, 2018). Her research in contemporary literature focuses on
autofiction, the anthropocene, and metamodernism.

ORCID
Alison Gibbons http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8912-9350

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