Notes Away From the New Romanticism

Declaring yourself the vanguard cadre of a revolutionary artistic movement is about as archetypical an American writerly pastime as expatriating yourself to Europe, getting unreasonably drunk in the daytime, and mistreating your wife. Peruse the nonfiction writings of American modernists and postmodernists and you’ll find more manifestos than you can shake a stick at. These declarations, as self-serious and egotistical as they often are, are valuable chiefly because they reveal the values of a writer (and by proxy, their movement), and allow us to understand why certain groups gravitated towards certain aesthetic sensibilities. At first glance, Ezra Pound’s Cantos are completely overwhelming, but read “A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste,” with its pithy list of verboten techniques, and you might understand a bit more about the sensibilities that animated Pound’s other work. This is the function of a manifesto: it outlines what exactly an author wants his movement to accomplish. That’s what a good one does, anyways.

Recently, there has been a frenzy of movement-building on the writing-focused social media website Substack. The writers-in-chief of this movement are a cadre of alt-lit commentators including John Pistelli, Ted Gioia, and Ross Barkan. Over the past few years, the latter two of these writers have even gone as far as to name their movement: Barkan and Gioia contend that their writing is part of a nascent cultural milieu they call New Romanticism. New Romanticism claims to take the mantle once worn by figures like Percy Bysshe Shelley and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Gioia and Barkan contend that many of the same political motifs of the immediate pre-Romantic era are present right now, and that many people—the population at large, sure, but more importantly artists and writers—are responding in the same way. Romanticism was a movement created in reaction to the Industrial Revolution, which displaced millions of workers and created a new social order almost overnight; New Romanticism is a reaction to the Digital Revolution, which is doing the same thing today. If one had to sum up the argument of New Romanticism in just a paragraph, it would be something like this:

Just as the first Industrial Revolution displaced people and changed fundamental modes of living, our digital revolution has rendered the world unrecognizable in just twenty five years. The thinkers and engineers behind this revolution have brought their attendant ideologies—neoliberalism, technocracy, and ultra-rationalist utilitarianism—from relative obscurity to suffocating ubiquity. In a world governed by unfeeling algorithms, a natural reaction is to privilege the human, the ineffable, and the relational. This is the core of New Romanticism: a reaction to the injustices of the modern world, made manifest by a refocusing of artistic pursuit on the joys of the individual, the natural, and the transcendental qualities of life that are unable to be captured by the algorithm.

I provide this spirited description because the available manifestos on New Romanticism are sorely lacking in it. This is not for want of trying: Ross Barkan’s “The Rise of The New Romanticism” is a clear attempt to outline the program of New Romanticism. Barkan writes “A little over a year ago, building on the work of the writer Ted Gioia, I proposed we might be entering a new Romantic era.” Indeed, this Substack piece is a straight rewrite of a piece Barkan published in the Guardian a year before, largely unchanged. Apparently, the movement does not move very fast.

Barkan begins with an extensive outlining of what he finds so lacking about today’s artistic culture. He cites anti-technology advocate Neil Postman and admits that he believes, like Postman, that “there [are] no moral underpinnings to the new computer age, no argument that rest[s]in universal human values.” This techno-nihilistic outlook is continued into the next two paragraphs, where Barkan bemoans the rise of remakes and the introduction of generative artificial intelligence: these two malaises, he believes, are really two sides of the same coin, a cultural tendency towards the reproduction of successful intellectual property rather than the production of new work. The corporate world is less interested than ever in lending capital to auteurs and artists: Barkan writes that “there was once a synergy between the profit motive and creativity, capitalism teaching us, in the twentieth century at least, that we could be a nation of cake-eaters. Now the sugar tastes rather lousy, and might be fake.”

So far, so good, though the easy part of any manifesto is identifying that something about society is wrong or sick. What’s harder is to lay out an ideological backing for your proposed movement, and in attempting to do this Barkan trips into the sort of messy historiography that contemporary manifestos often devolve into. Barkan coyly writes that “there are at least a few similarities between today’s upheaval and what came in the early nineteenth century,”

“Rationalism, for a time, seemed ascendant, as the rapid technological changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution promised their own algorithmic approaches for daily life... The individual, flesh-and-blood human never meant less, [with] wonders like the cotton gin and the coal-fired steam engine... Romanticism was the bloody cry against it all.”

Leaving aside some inaccuracies in Barkan’s language (Can we really compare the simple flow charts of Industrial Revolution mechanization to the vast, ungovernable algorithms that control our lives today?), we find that Barkan is clearly identifying himself, and every artist who responds with disgust to the deficiencies of today’s cultural landscape, with the original Romanticists of the 19th century. Barkan writes that these Romantics “were deeply wary of technology’s encroachment on the human spirit. They feared, ultimately, an inhuman future. Today’s nascent romantics sense something similar.”

Barkan, in typical manifesto-writing fashion, even ends his piece with a rousing call to action. He sees the popular contemporary disgust with modernity as the first step towards changing it. Despite being so nihilistic about the state of the world, Barkan believes we must be, for lack of a better word, romantic about its future. “I am sure, at least, we aren’t finished,” Barkan writes. “Human agency hasn’t been snuffed out. There is a world, as sickly as it might seem, to still win.”

Here is the rousing summation one looks for in a manifesto! This is a real call to action, though it’s not quite as catchy as “Make it New.” If one is already fed up with the state of the world, Barkan’s essay might inspire some fist-pumping and frenzied comment-writing (Comments under this piece call it “excellent,” a “tour de force,” and “a piece that warms my heart;” clearly, it is reaching its audience). But, though Barkan is a compelling writer at times, his manifesto leaves a lot to be desired. A good manifesto, in my view, requires three things:

1. A description of current tendencies in the world of arts, culture, and politics.

2. A spirited repudiation of these tendencies.

3. A proposal of new philosophical and artistic programs to counteract them.

Barkan, however, is so focused on the second task that he never substantively breaches the third. We are left ready to ‘win the world,’ as he says, but unsure of what we will make it into after we win it. Though Barkan spends paragraph after paragraph bemoaning Hollywood remakes, A.I slop, and the laziness of major record labels, he is surprisingly light on describing what art created in reaction to these soulless machinations might look like. The closest he comes to doing so is in his antepenultimate paragraph, which is the first time he discusses contemporary literature that fits his standards in any detail. One half of that paragraph is a discussion of the return of in-person ‘scenes.’ Barkan references Dimes Square, though he seems reluctant to accept that crowd into his milieu, hedging his endorsement. “Dimes Square, so concentrated in Manhattan, was a rejoinder that was at least Romantic in spirit: the pandemic will not keep us from gathering, and so we will make a physical place, again, the setting for something new.” Barkan, it seems, likes Dimes Square’s vibes but not its output, which is understandable. In terms of specific publications, Barkan cites Heavy Traffic, The Drift, and The Metropolitan Review, the last being a Substack magazine Barkan himself co-founded. Barkan suddenly becomes timid when it comes time to name actual artists that he believes are working in the New Romantic tradition. Barkan only names three specific writers working on Substack today who he believes are the vanguard of the new Romantics: John Pistelli, Sam Kriss, and Justin Smith-Ruiu. These three all seem to be his close friends, or at least his literary colleagues, but that’s alright: T.S Eliot showed lots of favoritism to his friends too. In fact, though Barkan namedrops figures like Wordsworth, Shelley, and Emerson in “The Rise of the New Romanticism.” Barkan’s extracurricular activities resemble more closely the clique-creating of the early Modernists.

So what is New Romanticism? Is it hanging out with your friends on the Lower East Side, not a phone in sight? Is it a literary movement, or a vibe? One would think that Barkan’s aforementioned literary magazine, The Metropolitan Review, would have some answers. Barkan and his cofounders have made a clear effort to identify The Metropolitan Review with the vanguard magazines of other movements: the first line of the Review’s introductory essay is “We are a quarter of the way through the new century, and the state of high culture is not what it should be,” and the back half of the essay quotes T.S. Eliot on the function of a literary magazine, and all but says aloud that they are taking up Eliot’s mantle.

But behind all the posturing, The Metropolitan Review’s output falls into the exact same traps that “The Rise of the New Romanticism” does. When one peers inside its pages,one finds not a nascent artistic movement but more of the same vain polemics against modern culture that are present in Barkan’s manifesto. The Metropolitan Review is mostly a magazine of voicy and vitriolic essays designed to go viral on Substack. Take Kill the Editor by Caleb Caudell, one of Metropolitan’s most-shared essays. It is a tirade against the traditional publishing industry and an endorsement of the Substack model—in other words, the sort of essay that is published on Substack once a day, every day. Caudell argues that, in an age where there is less and less chance of being published traditionally for unknown writers, the writing community should abandon these traditional gatekeepers entirely, and retreat (Or, in his view, advance) to the happy, gateless world of Substack. There are plenty of clever one-liners in Caudell’s piece, but not much of a sophisticated argument. Kill the Editor’s first problem is that it appears to be a rejoinder to a semi-viral Substack Note about what writers and editors should do to improve their craft (Hint: the post does not endorse Substack as a platform). From the beginning, it is reactive: Caudell is not seeking to advance an original argument but to attack somebody else’s. In the process of responding, Caudell often gets sidetracked on his quest to eradicate the establishment—ironically, the piece could have used a more exacting editor. But, when an article is designed to be ReStacked instead of reread, passages like these abound:

“Books like Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! teem with cornball pandering and hurdy-gurdy pseudo profundities, but they were supposedly treated to highly-paid editing by the best in the business. Maybe there’s no pronoun confusion in the prose of Vuong and Akbar, but if I were the editor of their books I wouldn’t use a red pen, I’d use a flamethrower.”

It’s cute, and it’s clever, but that’s all it is. It’s easy to deride bad fiction, especially bad fiction like On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, which is almost parodic in its stupidity (And, by the way, full of pronoun confusion). What’s harder, and what both Caudell and Barkan have heretofore failed to do, is advance an alternative set of standards by which we ought to judge contemporary literature. Caudell’s proposal is to Kill the Editor, but there’s not a sense of what killing the editor would do, besides punish the mean undergraduates at professional literary magazines who keep rejecting all of our work. A self-publishing model would certainly allow writers more freedom, but there’s not a critical eye towards what this freedom would mean for the writing world at large. Many of the terrible, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous-esque works in the contemporary canon are popular because of their easily digestible shareability: this format would allow them to thrive in the Substack-i-verse. In Caudell’s ideal decentralized writing industry, I suspect that the most successful authors would be memetic Rupi Kaur types—people who, I am certain, have already killed their editor. Caudell admits that “It’s true that on Substack, virtually anyone can publish anything. Terrible writers can dump their drivel and good writers can get away with slacking,” but counters that contemporary edited writing isn’t all that good anyways: “what’s Vogue been up to lately?” Caudell asks, “I’ll wait for someone to educate me.” Do you see what I mean about the one-liners?

An artistic movement like the one Barkan is trying to create might advocate for more freedom for writers, but the original Romanticists were not laissez-faire Marketplace of Ideas advocates: they had very specific aesthetic concerns which carried through in their work. But Caudell, as a representative of the Metropolitan and of New Romanticism as a whole, can’t move beyond simply being against the current writing industry. The closest Caudell comes is offhandedly remarking that

“The mania for efficiency and precision in literature is a bit peculiar; it’s as if leisurely and profligate artists take rationalistic, industrial and commercial values more seriously than scientists and businessmen...Do you know how entrepreneurs and psychologists write? It’s 99 percent packing peanuts, and they get paid for it.”

There is a hint of Caudell’s aesthetic principles here: not only does he think the modern editorial system doesn’t benefit writers, he thinks that unedited writing might have more merit, more heart, than work that has been edited to death. The original Romanticists were also believers in original artistic genius, and believed in some cases that the presence of an officious editor would be more likely to interrupt this genius than to spur it. So perhaps this is Caudell’s program, hidden as it is in so many attacks on the current culture: work that prioritizes an author’s voice over editorial efficiency, and artistic genius over rationalist editorializing.

If this is an aesthetic framework of New Romanticism, it is certainly present in The Metropolitan Review’s limited fiction section. Fiction is the redheaded stepchild of the Metropolitan’s oeuvre, boasting far fewer entries, but there is certainly a throughline to these pieces: a mouthy, quirky narratorial style, and a constant flexing of the authorial voice. Take, for example, the published excerpt of Bruce Wagner’s Amputation, a sprawling piece with four narrators, two of whom are caricatures of Stephen Colbert and Karen Bass. The Metropolitan Review notes in its introductory blurb Wagner’s “cultural acuity,” but what they seem to mean by this is that Amputation references current events at a pace rivalled only by the most insufferable of the Dimes Square scene. Wagner references trans bros and Refaat Alareer, mocks Between the World and Me and those who call Donald Trump “Orange Hitler Man,” and seems generally hellbent on capturing a Twitter timeline in novel form. It most closely resembles, in its pathological need to capture the inane speech patterns of the contemporary internet, a more thickly-plotted version of one of the stories from Honor Levy’s My First Book. Amputation’s promotional blurb breathlessly claims it to be “the first novel to be written about the [2025 L.A. Wildfires],” and this craven need to be first seems to have stopped Wagner from thinking about why authors don’t generally set their novels in a setting only six months past.

There is a lot going on in Amputation, and the editors of The Metropolitan Review, taken as they are with certain Romantic ideas, seem to have confused this busyness with an effusion of spontaneous artistic genius. It reminds me, quite frankly, of a lot of the subpar literary bestsellers on the market right now, which vaguely reference “the fascist president on T.V.” and “the pandemic” and think that these allusions constitute interesting fiction. If I wanted political commentary under the guise of literary fiction, I don’t have to read the New Romantics.

That’s not to say that there is no good writing on The Metropolitan Review. Polemical essays are often fun, and Django Ellenhorn’s “Paperback Vibrators and the Pragmatic Evasions of Literary Men” is an electrifying tirade against contemporary literature that succeeds in making good points while maintaining a caustic edge. But, if The Metropolitan Review is supposed to be a vanguard of the New Romanticism, and all it has to offer are a few viral essays, it isn’t doing anything that dozens of magazines aren’t already succeeding at. Would you like your polemics N+1 style or The Metropolitan Review style?

The meager output of the supposed vanguard raises the question: is this the right way of thinking about contemporary literature? If this is the sort of work that Barkan’s historical parallelism brings us, is it even useful at all? Though it’s easy to draw broad parallels between the first industrial revolution and the current information revolution, one cannot simply assume, as the New Romanticists tend to, that every development in contemporary culture has an analogue in the 1800s. The popular narrative of the original Romanticists is that they bravely cried out against a revolution in living that was advocated for by stodgy Enlightenment thinkers. The New Romanticists take this mantle ignorantly, ignoring the fact that, though the dominant political ideology of the last 30 years has been ultra-rationalist technocratic neoliberalism, the world of art and culture has been reactive to that neoliberalism since the passage of NAFTA. As much as the 21st century has been defined by the advancing march of the machines, it has also been defined by a persistent and loud outcry against those machines. Barkan and his fellow movement makers seem to think everybody still regards tech companies in the same manner we did in 2009: as happy-go-lucky, ping-pong playing progenitors of a utopic future, where Twitter powers color revolutions and we all love being online. Maybe the New Romantic conception of technology would be novel in 2009; but in 2025, if you’re just coming to the conclusion that the ideology of our tech overlords threatens our humanity and way of life, you’re the rear guard, not the avante garde.

The nature of the technology that the popular culture is railing against has changed, too. The dominant technologies of the past fifteen years have been the triptych devils of the algorithm, machine learning, and large language models. Unlike the labor-saving tools and assembly lines of the first Industrial Revolution, these technologies are distinctly non-transparent, though software engineers invented these tools, they do not know exactly how they function. This is because algorithms utilizing machine learning build on themselves, in a manner more akin to a living organism than a cotton gin. This is why your Twitter timeline sometimes serves you bizarre and inappropriate posts, or why ChatGPT sometimes hallucinates complicated falsehoods when answering simple questions. Engineers can’t fix these mistakes because they are not able to climb into the gears and tweak a bolt, like the machinists of old did 200 years ago. The machine is thinking on its own, and it does not seem to be a rational agent.

Aesthetically, this lends the modern tech landscape an air of Lovecraftian horror, as we desperately try to reign in the irrational machines we have wrought. Whatever you think generative A.I is, it does not feel rational to use. If rationalism was the dominant sociopolitical mode of the 2010s (And, considering the hysterical political populism that has permeated current events since 2016, I think even this reading is generous), it is certainly not the dominant sociopolitical mode of the 2020s. If you need any more proof of that, ask ChatGPT.

If Barkan and his contemporaries are not espousing new ways of thinking about the world—if they are simply parroting the popular view regarding technology and its encroachment upon the normal modes of living—then the value of New Romanticism must chiefly be in its aesthetic contributions—contributions, we have seen, which are sorely lacking. Reading through The Metropolitan Review, one finds that, beyond being good or bad, that the chief sin of the magazine is that it’s simply not very different from most contemporary literature. This is because the past twenty years of literary output—the stuff that the New Romantics claim to hate—has been far more Romantic in character than Barkan and his ilk think. The original Romantics believed that true works of great genius were created “ex nihilo;” or from nothing: today, writers and artists are encouraged to ignore the canon (Which is less taught in the Academy than ever) while simultaneously mining their own life for juicy autofictional detail. The Romantics privileged personal experience over collective knowledge: today, the popular mode in criticism is to shun statistics in favor of interpreting ‘the vibe.’ Most contemporary writing is completely obsessed with itself—it’s not just Romantic, it’s hysterically, melodramatically Romantic. If you had to ascribe an ideological bent to On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, would it be the cold, calculating rationalism of Rousseau, or the sweeping humanism of the Romantics? Can one really claim that a New Romantic movement is in any way countercultural if the dominant advice in writer’s circles of the 21st century is to ‘write what you know?’ What other phrase could be a more concise instruction to celebrate one’s own personal experience? How could one be any more Romantic?

If all this is true—if literature has been Romantic for far longer than Barkan has written about it—then the New Romantics are not the avante-garde at all—instead, they are late to the party, putting a name to trends that are already kitsch and hackneyed. Perhaps Barkan’s “The Rise of the New Romanticism” could have been revelatory fifteen years ago, when the alt-Lit scene popularized radical self-expression and confessionalism in a writing world which, in the aughts, was populated by sardonic, detached narrators. But, as it stands now, Barkan and the New Romanticists are a team of the world’s worst meteorologists: predicting a movement that has already come and gone. Confessional, individual, ill-contexted writing is not just in vogue: it's already on its way out. Does anyone really want to read another personal essay on The Cut?

There’s no denying that we’re in an era of cultural stagnation: Barkan has been so successful on Substack precisely because he has been able to tap into the anger and dissatisfaction so many writers and critics have with their own industry. But New Romanticism is fifteen years too late: politically, it espouses positions on technology and culture which are already mainstream; aesthetically, it calls for more feeling in a literary landscape already dominated by it. Its manifestos are lazy; its output is mediocre. When I read the writing published in The Metropolitan Review, I see many of the same deficiencies that are present in books and essays published by the Big Five, and this indicates to me that the Romanticist ideals that Barkan is attempting to revive are precisely the ones wrongly suited for the current moment. The literary scene certainly needs some sort of revolutionary movement to shock it out of its stagnation, but it’s clear that New Romanticism isn’t up to the task, at least not right now. The frustrated writers of the world will have to wait a little longer for their Superman.