David Vichnar at 3:AM Magazine:
Writing à propos of Louis Armand’s recent opus magnum, A Tomb in H-Section (2025), critic Ramiro Sanchiz called it “a necromodernist tour de force which animates every remain of (un)dead XXth century literature,” thus invoking the spectre of necromodernism, a modernism long-buried but still somehow living on, its undead corpse back again for yet another zombie standoff. In a similar vein, the publisher note described the tome as “a vast, complex book object that concentrates the synergies of Louis Armand’s Golemgrad Pentalogy, of which it is at once a crowning achievement and a jocoserious deconstruction — an ‘Armandgeddon,’ if you will.”
Common to both assessments of Armand’s writing — to reverse a well-known Lyotard maxim regarding postmodernism — is a notion of a type of modernism in its posthumous state, a necromodernist condition in which writing persists in the ruins of literature’s once-modern ambitions. Necromodernism neither celebrates the new nor nostalgically mourns the old, inhabiting instead a space where cultural memory, media saturation, and infrastructural collapse converge into textual practice. It is neither an elegy for modernism nor a prophecy of what comes next, but rather a practice of endurance.
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