Contemporary Literature (U.S.) & Media - Dr.

Arputharaj Devaraj
Descriptive version of PPT presented in the International Seminar on Changing
Contours of English Literature @ Meenakshi College, Chennai 24 on 08-09-2016

The term "contemporary literature", according to the West, applies to the

literature written after World War II (Wikipedia). It is a relative term. To me, a
Professor teaching New Literatures in English, it should be literature produced
during the last 16 years or so, because a generation normally means 30 to 33
years. If it has to be contemporary, it should be well within that half to which one
belongs to. Hence, to me, it should be the literature produced from 2000 to 2016.

For convenience sake, I stick to the convention. According to the Western

concept, Contemporary Literature (CL) is reactionary in tendency. Most often, the
writer reacts and sometimes opposes to the happenings around him. Chinua
Achebe’s The Novelist as a Teacher talks about this: “He is in revolt against
society which in turn looks on him with suspicion, if not hostility.” (p.181)

CL, as the West believes, ironically reflects on a society’s political, social and
individual’s opinion and criticism. It reflects the recent trends in life, culture, style,
etc. These things often change and so the flow of the CL is fluid. It affects the
other media, namely, theater, movie, song, art, dance, music and the other
performing arts.

CL reveals the writer’s perspective- sometimes sarcastic, cynical, why even biased.
It questions the facts, historical perspectives and presents the opposing views
side by side. After World War II, the world started looking at things in a different
way. Accordingly the CL had a different perspective on things. On seeing the
horrors of the WW II, many believed that God was either dead or did not exist.
This made them believe that life was meaningless. Writers struggled to express
this bizarre "truth" in their writings.

In the 21st century, contemporary literature reflects these beliefs and changes
often, based on how the world changes. It is based on human diversity, character
and emotion. These are the concerns of the contemporary society: i) Economic
colonization, ii) Global warming, iii) Neo Imperialism, iv) Trans-border terrorism,
v) Poverty, filth & squalor, vi) LGBT, racial, ethnic & communal problems, & vii)
Crime, corruption, avarice, etc.

CL gives equal importance to the concept of the ‘other’. CL also shows its concern
to the subaltern. It takes into consideration various ‘isms’: Orientalism,
Occidentalism, communism, capitalism, socialism, magic realism, new journalism,
feminism, womanism, etc. Wole Soyinka goes speechless on seeing all these
‘isms’:

Ism to ism for ism is ism

Of isms and isms on absolute ism (Kongi’s Harvest, CP2 p.61).

It is interesting to study the movements in the CL. The Beat Generation, a group

of writers explored and influenced American culture in the post-World War II era,
in the 1950s. The Beats rejected the standard narrative values. Their themes
included exploration of American and Eastern religions, rejection of materialism,
explicit portrayals of the human condition, and experimentation with loose
morals. Allen Ginsberg's Howl (1956), William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch (1959)
and Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957) are glaring examples of Beat
literature. Both Howl and Naked Lunch were the focus of obscenity trials that
ultimately helped to liberalize publishing in the United States. In the 1960s,
elements of the expanding Beat movement were incorporated into the hippie and
larger counterculture movements. 

The Black Mountain poets, otherwise known as projectivist poets, were a group

of mid 20th century American avant-garde or postmodern poets. In 1950, Charles
Olson published his seminal essay, Projective Verse. In this, he called for a poetry
of "open field" composition to replace traditional closed poetic forms with an
improvised form that should reflect exactly the content of the poem. This form
was to be based on the line, and each line was to be a unit of breath and of
utterance. The content was to consist of "one perception immediately and
directly (leading) to a further perception".
Confessional poetry or 'Confessionalism' is a style of poetry in the United States
during the 1950s. It was a poetry "of the personal," focusing on extreme
moments of individual experience, the psyche, and personal trauma, including
previously taboo matter such as mental illness, sexuality, and suicide, often set in
relation to broader social themes. It is also classified as Postmodernism.
"Confessional Poetry" was associated with several American poets in the 1950s
and 1960s, including Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Anne
Sexton, Allen Ginsberg, and W. D. Snodgrass.

The New York School was an informal group of American poets, painters,

dancers, and musicians in the 1950s and 1960s, who drew inspiration
from surrealism and the contemporary avant-garde art movements,  abstract
expressionism, jazz, improvisational theater, experimental music, etc.

The New Wave is a movement in science fiction produced in the 1960s and 1970s

with a high degree of experimentation, both in form and in content, a "literary" or
artistic sensibility, and a focus on "soft" as opposed to hard science. New Wave
writers saw themselves as part of the modernist tradition and sometimes mocked
the traditions of pulp science fiction, which some of them regarded as boring,
adolescent and poorly written. The term "New Wave" is borrowed from the
French film movement the nouvelle vague.
The Language poets are an avant garde (most modern) group or tendency
in United States poetry during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The poets included:
Leslie Scalapino, Stephen Rodefer, Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Ron
Silliman, Barrett Watten, Lyn Hejinian, Bob Perelman, Rae Armantrout, Carla
Harryman, Clark Coolidge, Hannah Weiner, Susan Howe, and Tina Darragh.
Language poetry emphasizes the reader's role in bringing meaning out of a work.
It played down expression, seeing the poem as a construction in and of language
itself. Language poetry is an example of poetic postmodernism.
Cyberpunk is a kind of science fiction, set in in future, portraying the society of
the proverbial "high tech low life" that features advanced technological and
scientific achievements, such as IT & cybernetics, juxtaposed with a breakdown in
the social order. American author Bruce Bethke coined the term "cyberpunk" in
his 1980 short story of the same name. It was proposed as a name for a new
generation of punk teenagers belonging to the IT Age. The term was used as a
label to the works of William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, John Shirley, Rudy
Rucker, Michael Swanwick, Pat Cadigan, Lewis Shiner, Richard Kadrey, and
others. 
Classic cyberpunk characters were marginalized, alienated loners who lived on the
edge of society in generally dystopic futures where daily life was impacted by
rapid technological change, an ubiquitous datasphere of computerized
information, and invasive modification of the human body. Cyberpunk plots often
center on conflict among artificial intelligences, hackers, and among mega
corporations. It is set in a future Earth, not so far as those of Isaac
Asimov's Foundation or Frank Herbert's Dune. 
The film Blade Runner (1982), adapted from Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of
Electric Sheep?, is set in 2019, in a dystopian future. It features manufactured
beings called replicants. They are used as slaves on space colonies. They are legal
prey on Earth to various bounty hunters who extinguish them. The movie omits
the religious and mythical elements of Dick's original novel (e.g. empathy boxes
and Wilbur Mercer). Hence it is categorized under the cyberpunk genre. The film
became a torch-bearer to many a cyberpunk movie, including The Matrix, Johnny
Mnemonic and New Rose Hotel.
A hybrid genre, "tech-noir" film, combining neo-noir and science fiction or
cyberpunk, includes many cyberpunk films such as Blade Runner, Burst City, The
Terminator, Robocop, 12 Monkeys, The Lawnmower Man, Hackers, Hardware,
and Strange Days.

The term maximalism is associated with post-modern novels by David Foster

Wallace, Thomas Pynchon and others, where digression, reference, and
elaboration of detail occupy a great fraction of the text. It can refer to anything
excessive, complex and "showy".

New Formalism is a late 20th- and early 21st-century movement in American

poetry that has promoted a return to metrical and rhymed verse that was short-
lived. Annie Finch's edited essay collection, After New Formalism: Poets on Form
and Narrative (1999) is seen as marking the end of the first phase of the
movement.

A poetry slam is a competition in which poets recite their work that are judged by

selected members of the audience as a panel of judges. In a poetry slam,
members of the audience are chosen by an emcee or host to act as judges for the
event. At the end of the competition, the poet with the highest score is declared
winner.

A number of cyberpunk derivatives were identified as distinct subgenres

in speculative fiction. Though they do not share cyberpunk's computer-centered
setting, may display other qualities drawn from cyberpunk: a world built on one
particular technology that is extrapolated to a highly sophisticated urban style, or
a particular approach to social themes. The most successful of these
subgenres, Steampunk, a "kind of technological fantasy", and others in this
category sometimes also incorporate aspects of science fantasy and historical
fantasy. 

The New Weird began in the 1990s and developed in a series of novels and
stories published from 2001 to 2005. These novelists are considered to be parts of
the horror and speculative fiction genres, who often cross genre boundaries.
Notable authors include China Miéville, Jeff Vander Meer, K. J. Bishop and Steph
Swainston.

According to Jeff VanderMeer and Ann VanderMeer, in their introduction to the

anthology The New Weird, the genre is "a type of urban, secondary-world fiction
that subverts the romanticized ideas about place found in traditional fantasy,
largely by choosing realistic, complex real-world models as the jumping off point
for creation of settings that may combine elements of both science fiction and
fantasy." According to Robin Anne Reid, New Weird is disputed a term to
describe fictions that "subvert clichés of the fantastic in order to put them to
discomfiting, rather than consoling ends". He observes that the genre breaks
down the barriers between fantasy, science fiction and supernatural horror. 
Contemporary fiction includes stories set in modern times sans the elements of
fantasy. It is technically a kind of realistic fiction, and the term "contemporary" is
used specifically to distinguish it from realistic fiction with a historical setting,
which is also generally common and fairly popular. Contemporary fiction, making
us think hypothetically of everyday experience of someone else, is designed to
create social awareness. They are also written for the purpose of entertainment.
They are of course socially relevant, focusing on issues like race relations, sexism,
crime and poverty.

Contemporary / Literary fiction has the following characteristics: i) It contains

characters that behave the way most readers would. ii) The characters are
believable. iii) The story is set in the present. iv) The setting, happenings and
events are real. v) Dialogue is informal and conversational. Some examples of
Contemporary/Literary fiction are “Slaughterhouse Five” by Kurt Vonnegut,
“Atonement: A Novel” by Ian McEwan, and “White Noise” by Don DiLillo.

Major Themes in the Contemporary American Novel : the postwar American

novelists focus their vision on the most critical issues of the individual and society
in an era of vast technological change and social turmoil. Some major themes of
the important novelists are: Joseph Heller's "Struggle with Dehumanization," J. D.
Salinger's "Problem of Being," Ralph Ellison's "Search for a True Self," Carson
McCullers' "Ethics of Love," Reynolds Price's "Appraisal of Love," Saul Bellow's
"Conception of Freedom," John Gardner's "New Definition of Morality," E. L.
Doctorow's "Idea of Justice," and Bernard Malamud's "Renewal of the Human
Spirit."
Contemporary poetry includes poems written from the mid-20th century to the
present day. The various types of contemporary poetry have similar themes and
writing style. In the United States, contemporary poems are of two kinds: i) a kind
of conventional poetry, written by Maya Angelou and Rita Dove; & ii) avant-garde
poetry, written by poets like Frank O’Hara and Robert Grenier. The conventional
poetry has widely accepted themes and style, whereas avant-garde poetry is
more experimental. Most of the contemporary poems are written in free verse, in
everyday language. They are usually short. Conventional poems stick to the strict
formats of poetry, like lyrics, sonnets, ballads and odes. The themes of
contemporary poems are love, family, and death. Contemporary poetry focuses
more on a particular idea or image, enabling the reader to construe its meaning.

Contemporary American literature

Though qualities and variables are intriguing, the postmodernism is a strikingly a

significant movement since 1970. Thomas Pynchon, a pronounced postmodernist,
showed in his work the modernists’ components like temporal distortion,
unreliable narrators, and internal monologue and mixed them up with
postmodernists’ techniques like metafiction, ideogrammatic characterization,
unrealistic names, absurdist plot elements and hyperbolic humor, deliberate use
of anachronisms and archaisms, a strong focus on postcolonial themes, and a
subversive mix of high and low culture. His works include Gravity's Rainbow
(1978), V. (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Mason & Dixon (1997), and Against
the Day (2006).
Toni Morrison, a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, writes in a particular
lyrical prose style. Her novels include The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon (1977)
and Beloved (1987). Beloved was chosen in a 2006 survey conducted by the New
York Times as the most important work of fiction of the last 25 years.
Writing in a lyrical, flowing style, Cormac McCarthy dwells on the literary
traditions of several regions America and spans multiple genres. His novels have
attained both commercial and critical acclaim. Many of his works have
been made films.
Don DeLillo, became famous with the publication of White Noise (1985). His
works included the themes like death, consumerism, American life, nuclear
weapons and baseball. His important novels include Americana (1971),
Underworld (1997), Libra (1988), Mao II (1991) and Falling Man (2007).
Diligently applying the distinct postmodern techniques of digression, narrative
fragmentation and elaborate symbolism, and strongly influenced by the works of
Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace produced The Broom of the System
(1987), Infinite Jest (1997), and The Pale King (2011).
Wallace's friend and contemporary, Jonathan Franzen’s National Book Award-
winning tragicomic novel, The Corrections (2001) brought him fame. He also
wrote the well-received The Twenty-Seventh City (1988), a novel set in St. Louis,
and Freedom (2010) which weathered a great critical acclaim.
Other significant writers of the last decade are Michael Chabon, who wrote the
Pulitzer Prize-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000) dealing
with the story of two friends, Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay, as they come to
prominence in the comics industry; Denis Johnson, who produced the National
Book Award winning novel Tree of Smoke (2007) set in Vietnam; and Louise
Erdrich, whose wrote the novels, The Plague of Doves (2008) and the 2012
National Book Award winning The Round House (2012).

Minority literatures
Besides African Americans and Jewish Americans, other ethnicities in the USA
established their literary traditions in the late-20th-century American literature.
This impetus ushered in by the Civil Rights movements and its corollary, the
Ethnic Pride movement made possible the creation of Ethnic Studies programs in
the American universities. This made the new ethnic literature a worthy
academic study.
Asian American literature achieved widespread notice through Maxine Hong
Kingston's fictional memoir, The Woman Warrior(1976), and her novels China
Men (1980) and Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book; and the Chinese-
American author Ha Jin’s award winning novels, Waiting (1999), and War Trash
(2005).
Indian-American author Jhumpa Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize for her collection of
short stories, Interpreter of Maladies (1999). Her well-received novel, The
Namesake (2003) was made into a film in 2007. Her second collection of
stories, Unaccustomed Earth, was also well received.
Other significant Asian-American novelists include Amy Tan, best known for her
novel, The Joy Luck Club (1989), and Korean American novelist Chang-Rae Lee,
who wrote Native Speaker, A Gesture Life, and Aloft. Some important Asian
American poets are Marilyn Chin, Li-Young Lee, Kimiko Hahn and Janice Mirikitani.
Latina/o literature became prominent thanks to the acclaimed novels by Tomás
Rivera and Rudolfo Anaya (Bless Me, Ultima), and the emergence of Chicano
theater with Luis Valdez and Teatro Campesino. Sandra Cisneros’ The House on
Mango Street (1984) is taught in American schools.
Dominican-American writer Junot Díaz’s novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar
Wao (2007) received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It deals with the story of a
Dominican boy made into a a social outcast in New Jersey. Julia Alvarez is another
Dominican writer, well known for How the García Girls Lost Their Accents and In
the Time of the Butterflies.  Oscar Hijuelos, a Cuban American  won a Pulitzer
for The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, and Cristina García received acclaim
for Dreaming in Cuban.
Puerto Rican novelists include Giannina Braschi ( Yo-Yo Boing! ) and Rosario Ferré
(Eccentric Neighborhoods). The other Puerto Rican playwrights are René
Marqués, Luis Rafael Sánchez, José Rivera, Julia de Burgos, Giannina
Braschi and Pedro Pietri.
Native American literature came of age on the success of N. Scott Momaday's
Pulitzer Prize–winning House Made of Dawn. The novelists, Leslie Marmon
Silko ( Ceremony), Gerald Vizenor ( Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles), Louise
Erdrich (Love Medicine ), James Welch ( Winter in the Blood), Sherman
Alexie ( The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven), and poets Simon
Ortiz and Joy Harjo ushered in the Native American Renaissance.
Arab American literature has become conspicuous through the novels of Diana
Abu-Jaber ( Arabian Jazz and Crescent and the memoir The Language of Baklava),
writings of Etel Adnan, Rabih Alameddine and poet Naomi Shihab Nye.
Contemporary American literature, as considered by American themselves is
subversive, containing surrealism, bizarre names, plots and biting commentary. It
is postmodernist and distrustful. It not only questions the cultural inconsistencies,
but also allows such inconsistencies to bloom within the narrative. It is pertinent
to note that most of the acclaimed contemporary literature is adapted for the
other media - cinema and the theater.

REFERENCES:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_literature

https://qwiklit.com/2013/10/31/25-contemporary-american-novels-you-should-read-right-now/
http://study.com/academy/lesson/contemporary-american-literature-authors-and-major-works.html

http://study.com/academy/lesson/the-contemporary-period-in-american-literature.html

http://iipdigital.usembassy.gov/st/english/publication/2008/05/20080516134208eaifas0.1100885.html

https://uwpress.wisc.edu/journals/journals/cl.html