Shared Pain, the War and Identity: Peculiarities of Ukrainian Literary Metamodernism

This article examines specific manifestations of the metamodern structure of feeling and features of metamodern poetics represented in contemporary Ukrainian literature, as well as the influence of the state of war, in which Ukraine has been involved since 2014, on the perception of the universal aesthetic characteristics of metamodernism in the national artistic discourse.The global phenomenon of metamodernism is considered in the article in its connections with the previous modernist and postmodern traditions and in the context of the political and cultural processes of the end of the 20th — beginning of the 21th centuries. While scrutinizing Ukrainian fictional works, we referred to the main contemporary research on metamodernism, post-posmodernism, metamodern structure of feeling, and metamodernist aesthetics but the basis of the literary analysis of Ukrainian texts included mainly the studies by Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker, Alison Gibbons, Seth Abramson, and Greg Dember. On the basis of their research the specific set of traits of the Ukrainian literary metamodernism was developed, including oscillation, hyper-self-reflexivity, open potentiality as a spatiotemporal characteristic of the artistic worlds, eccentricity of characters («quirky»), ironesty, return of metanarratives (notably, metanarrative of the Ukrainian national identity), attention to influence of media on the identity shaping, imitation of the formal features of postmodernism, the cultivation of immersion in someone else’s felt experience (a «need for a we»), adherence to the ideas of transhumanism and the Anthropocene, cautious optimism and normcore. Despite the unique historical background of the formation of Ukrainian metamodernism (in particular, the persistent attempts of re-colonization of Ukraine by russia during the period of the State Independence, three revolutions and the current war), the key features of this phenomenon in Ukrainian literature are considered to be a «need for a we», hyper-selfreflexivity, and awareness of the importance of a person’s connection with the community.