Self‐reflexivity, intertextuality and historicity: A metamodernist reading of Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer's Grand Hotel Europa (2018)

Abstract

This article uses metamodernism as a heuristic framework to discuss Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer's Grand Hotel Europa (2018), arguing that the autofictional novel reclaims the ethical, emotional and historical ambitions of literature in the wake of postmodernism. While employing familiar postmodern strategies such as metafiction and intertextuality, GHE repurposes these devices to engage critically with twenty‐first‐century phenomena, including mass tourism, migration and the erosion of European cultural identity. Our analysis unfolds in three parts: first, we examine the novel's self‐reflexivity and how its metafictional strategies implicate readers as ethically situated participants in the realities the novel depicts. Second, we discuss how intertextuality functions as a metamodern technique for articulating truth claims. Third, we consider the novel's historicity, which collapses past, present and speculative futures into an affectively charged reflection on Europe's political and cultural trajectory. In doing so, Grand Hotel Europa epitomizes the metamodern turn in contemporary literature: a renewed belief in fiction's capacity to speak meaningfully about the world by infusing aesthetics with ethical and affective seriousness.