Contemporary Literature - Course Introduction
Blood. Guts. Suburban angst.
These are the things that contemporary literature is made of—chaos, reality, and experimentation that the writing world had never seen until the late 20th century, and you'll get to experience right away in this course.
So be prepared to get your hands dirty and tear-stained—with James Baldwin, Kurt Vonnegut, Joan Didion, and more. The gang's all here.
Contemporary American literature is traditionally defined as any work written after 1945. Why that mysterious number? Well, some big changes were happening in America after World War II. With soldiers coming home and good feelings abounding, the population boomed, the suburbs blossomed, and the cities exploded. (Yay!)
On the other hand, there was also an intense rise in feelings of alienation, overreliance on technology, violence, segregation, sexism, and homophobia. (Boo!)
Contemporary literature reflected these awesome and awful changes in modern life. The stylistic choices that authors made included:
- Experimental sentence structure portraying mood and tone
- Metafiction (works of literature focused on the writing process itself)
- Dark, realistic themes
- Challenges or responses to "traditional" literature
- New journalism more focused on its authors than its subjects
During our six units, we're going to learn about all these changes, as well as others that shook up the writing world. We'll start with a unit about Beatniks—1940s hipsters who pioneered a more modern style of writing. Then we'll move on to a unit about war, with two very different works showing the emotional impact of violence on the human spirit. Units Three and Four trace the tradition of activism and minority status in literature from the 1700s to today: A big part of contemporary literature, after all, is challenging the stodgy old traditions of the genre. We'll finish the course with a unit about post-apocalyptic fiction (hint: Everyone dies), and contemporary non-fiction (hint: Journalists love to make articles about themselves).
Does contemporary literature sound depressing? Self-congratulatory? Perhaps. But it's also produced some of the best writing of all time, and changed books (and reading them) as we know it.