International Journal of Language & Literature

Metamodernism Poetics and Its Manifestations in Billy Collins’s “My Hero”
Tawfiq Yousef

Abstract
Metamodernism has been defined as a set of developments in philosophy, aesthetics and culture which have emerged from and are reacting to postmodernism. It is a recent current in contemporary literary theory and culture and together with postmodernism have become the two most predominant modes of present critical analysis. As a critical/cultural sensibility, metamodernism has been recognized as a new entrant to the writing of literary works in addition to the academic study of literature. In this paper, metamodernism is explored as one of postmodernism‘s proposed successors, in theory and practice. This paper highlights the basic poetics of metamodernism and tries to apply them to the analysis of ―My Hero‖, a short poem by the American laureate poet Billy Collins. Though reference is made to some of the major heralds of metamodernism, the primary model which will be discussed and utilized for interpretation is that construed by Timotheus Vermeulen and Van den Akker in their pioneering paper ―Notes on Metamodernism‖ (2010).

Full Text: PDF      DOI: 10.15640/ijll.v6n1a8