Authors

Discussion

From the beginning of the new millennia, one can trace an intensification of the discussion regarding the cultural trends and structures of a feeling moving beyond the postmodern one. Even though the consensus on what postmodernism is was not reached, scholars attempted to conceptualize and discuss its possible descendants. In parallel, a shift became increasingly observable in new texts, movies, video games, and other pop culture artifacts. This not only meant the appearance of new authors with texts significantly different from that typically associated with postmodernism but also a change in the writing of their established postmodern colleagues.

This presentation suggests considering Vladimir Sorokin as one of those no-more-just-postmodernists. While his writing from the '90s and early 2000s is usually considered remarkably postmodern, his newest texts are rather resistant to being read solely through the postmodern frame. The talk will continue the recently started rethinking of a structure of feeling in the newest Sorokin’s text, claiming it better fits post-postmodern frameworks rather than postmodern ones. I will focus on Doctor Garin (2021) as perhaps the most vital Sorokin’s text and search for frames to highlight, reveal, and analyze the new sensibilities in the novel. This will mainly utilize a concept of metamodernism as described by Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker a bit more than a decade ago, pointing out the pillaring features of metamodernism — oscillation, desire for [re]construction, strive for social coherence, metamodern affect and hyper-self-reflexivity, and postanthropocentrism — and showing their presence in recent Sorokin’s writing on the example of Blizzard (2010) and Doctor Garin (2021).

However, it is clear that reading these texts thoroughly might require using more than solely a metamodern frame. Therefore, I plan to test hypermodernism as an alternative theoretical reference, looking at what it can possibly add to our understanding of Sorokin’s postmodernism. This is even more topical given that the final part of Garin’s trilogy—Legacy (2023)—is acknowledged as one of the most violent and dark in Sorokin’s bibliography. Developing this idea even further, one could suggest that the complicated nature of post-postmodern frameworks and structures of feeling points towards the simultaneous applicability of both metamodern and hypermodern frame in a complex intertwined relation that is still to be observed, considered, and explored.