Off-modern, a word invented by Svetlana Boym, is defined as a detour into the unexplored potentials of the modern project.
Off-modern reflection involves exploration of the lateral potentialities of the project of critical modernity.
The word "off-modern” was coined by Boym in The Future of Nostalgia, finished in 2000 and published in 2001.
In Boym's own words, "the adverb off confuses our sense of direction; it makes us explore slideshadows and backalleys rather than the straight road of progress; it allows us to take a detour from the deterministic narrative of twentieth-century history.
In the off-modern tradition, reflection and longing, estrangement and affection go together" (Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, 2001, pp.