Metamodernism: Meaning-Making by moving Beyond Postmodern Irony and Skepticism in Zain Saeed’s Little America

Abstract

This research paper examines how Zain Saeed’s Little America creates a new approach to meaning-making by moving beyond postmodern irony and skepticism through a metamodernist lens. While postmodern literature repeatedly challenges grand narratives and maintains detachment (Lyotard, 1984; Baudrillard, 1994), Little America demonstrates a divergent movement toward sincerity, relational complexity, and affective depth. Drawing on Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker’s basic definition of metamodernism, Hanzi Freinacht’s politics of hope, and Alison Gibbons’s work on depth-after-depthlessness, this research examines key narrative passages, oscillating between scenes of personal transgression, cultural negotiation, emotional reckoning, and institutional failure. Through these instances, Saeed’s novel “Little America” illustrates techniques of metamodern such as oscillation between hope and despair, ethical ambivalence, embodied vulnerability, transparent authority, and narrative re-enchantment. In due course, Little America offers a forceful literary model for how contemporary fiction can reengage with meaning, self, and community amid global flux and dislocation, following a middle path between uncritical idealism and detached cynicism.