Contemporary Literature
Definition of Contemporary Writing
Contemporary Literature or Contemporary Writing refers to the period started after World War II through the current day. There are not clear-cut explanations of this concept, there are only interpretations by scholars and academics. Some people argue that contemporary literature is writing completed after 1940. A few scholars claim this period started at the end of World War II, and this is where the era's pairing with Postmodern Literature comes in. The Postmodern era began after World War II, in the 1940s, and lasted through the 1960s. The Contemporary period extends to the current day.
The word Contemporary means living, belonging to or occurring in the present. So, when talking about contemporary we refer to the literature that is being written in the now about now. Works of contemporary literature reflect a society's social and/or political viewpoints, shown through realistic characters, connections to current events, and socioeconomic messages to reflect how the current time is working. The writers of this period look for trends that illuminate societal strengths and weaknesses to remind society of lessons they should learn and questions they should ask. So, when referring to contemporary literature, we cannot simply look at a few themes or settings since it is more complex, it covers many different themes and important events.
When talking about contemporary
literature and the start date of this label, we have to acknowledge World War
II and the surrounding events; The horrors of the war, including bombs, ground
wars, genocide, and corruption are the pathways to this type of literature
and even in the current time, this persists. It is from these real-life themes
that we find the beginning of a new period of writing. Since society changes through time, so do the content and messages of writing that is why it is more
complex than some specific themes.
- Reality-based stories with strong characters and a believable story.
- Well-defined, realistic, highly
developed characters in realistic, sometimes harsh environments.
- Often the stories are character-driven.
- The literature is ironic and reflects
current political, social, and personal issues.
- May reflect a personal cynicism,
disillusionment, and frustration.
- Facts are questioned as are historical
perspectives.
- Often presents two contradictory
arguments.
- The literature may reflect a growing
skepticism in the existence of God as well as distrust or lack of faith in
traditional institutions. (Farooq, 2018).
During this period the most common literary pieces produced were Novels, Poems, Fictions, Non-Fiction, Epiphanies, and Memoirs.
Novels:
- E.L. Doctorow: Ragtime (1975)
Set in 1906, Ragtime tells the story of
Harry Houdini, a famous escape artist who crashes into a telephone pole outside
a family’s home. Filled with many sub-stories and plots, Doctorow captures
American history as a series of random events, challenging the nature of
recorded history. As a result, Doctorow subverts the traditional set-up of the
novel in its intricate mixing of historical and fictional characters into a
single narration.
- Alex Haley, Roots: The Saga of an American Family (1976)
As a work of, what Haley calls,
“faction,” Roots tells the semi-biographical story of his ancestors. Starting
with the 18th-century, Kunta Kinte, Haley’s African ancestor who was captured
and sold into United States slavery, he creates a genealogy of his ancestors.
Through this recount, Haley records the injustices and struggles found within
the African slave trade, making it not only a great novel but also a
significant document for future generations.
- John Kennedy Toole: A Confederacy of
Dunces (1980)
Published posthumously, A Confederacy
of Dunces is a comedic novel that takes place in the 1950s, New Orleans. It follows
Ignatius J. Reilly who has a master’s degree in medieval studies, no job and
who lives with his mother. Like the Rabbit series and Ragtime, Toole has a
collection of seemingly random stories that seduce the reader as he or she
tries to tie narrations together before Toole reveals their connection at the end
of the novel.
- Laura Kasischke: The Infinitesimals (2014).
- Aja Monet: My Mother Was a Freedom
Fighter (2017).
- Terrance Hayes: Wind in a Box (2006).
- The Glass Menagerie (1944).
The Glass Menagerie,
one-act drama by Tennessee Williams, produced in 1944 and published in 1945.
The Glass Menagerie launched Williams’s career and is considered by some
critics to be his finest drama.
The Slave (1964).
The Slave, one-act
play by Amiri Baraka performed and published in 1964. An examination of the tension between blacks and whites in contemporary America, The Slave is the
story of a visit by African American Walker Vessles to the home of Grace, his
white ex-wife, and Easley, her white husband. Baraka points up the black man’s
low status in American society but also stresses that he is victimized and
enslaved by his own hatred and is thus unable to effect social change.
- The White Album (1979).
The White Album is a 1979 book of essays by Joan Didion. Like her previous book Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album is a collection of works previously published in magazines such as Life and Esquire. The subjects of the essays range widely and represent a mixture of memoir, criticism, and journalism, focusing on the history and politics of California in the late 1960s and early 70s. With the publication of The White Album, Didion had established herself as a prominent writer on Californian culture. As one contemporary reviewer stated, "California belongs to Joan Didion. (Walter Blair, 2018).
Famous writers of the Contemporary period
- Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (11, 1922 – April 11,
2007) was an American writer. In a career spanning over 50 years, Vonnegut
published fourteen novels, three short story collections, five plays, and five
works of nonfiction, with further collections being published after his death.
He is most famous for his darkly satirical, bestselling novel
Slaughterhouse-Five (1969).
- Player Piano (1952).
Vonnegut’s vision of
an America restructured by industrial technocrats whose robotics in the
workplace results in a devaluing of human participation. Vonnegut poses the
question of human purpose in the face of a world commercially and
institutionally driven to automate life.
- Mother Night (1961).
The closest Vonnegut
gets to “Nazi monkey business” until letting go in Slaughterhouse-Five. Framed
as Howard W. Campbell, Jr.’s memoirs requested by Israeli war crimes
investigators, he is an American by birth, a German playwright by occupation,
an American spy and, by necessity, a member of the Nazi party tasked with
badmouthing the Allied forces through English language broadcasts.
- A man without a country (2005).
Vonnegut’s manifesto,
providing nuggets of wisdom and wonder about life’s woeful ironies. This is
Vonnegut shorthand, his voice, exploring human values and beliefs. Often using
President George W. Bush, dunce-like, as an exemplar of those relying on
misinformation or misperceptions presented as generally accepted principles,
Vonnegut paints Bush’s falsehoods as nothing more than guesses, myths
(including religious theologies), and poorly conceived stereotypes.
- John Steinbeck.
(Salinas, 1902 - New York, 1968) American narrator and playwright, famous for the novels that place him on the front line of the naturalist current or of American social realism, along with names like Erskine Caldwell and others. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962.
Most important pieces of work:
- Tortilla Flat (1935).
Tortilla Flat is the
tumbledown Section of the town of Monterey in California. Here live the
paisanos, a mixed-race of Spanish, Indian Mexican, and assorted Caucasian
blood. In Mr. Steinbeck’s humorous and whimsical tale, they appear as a gentle
race of sun-loving, heavy wine-drinking, anti-social loafers, and hoodlums who
work only when necessity demands and generally live by a succession of devious
stratagems more or less outside the law.
- The Grapes of Wrath (1939).
Steinbeck’s longest and angriest and most impressive work … There are deaths on the road—Grampa is the first to go—but there is not much time for mourning. A greater tragedy than death is a burned-out bearing, repaired after efforts that Steinbeck describes as if he were singing the exploits of heroes at the siege of Troy … The first half-dozen of these interludes have not only broadened the scope of the novel but have been effective in themselves, sorrowful, bitter, intensely moving. But after the Joads reach California, the interludes are spoken in a shriller voice. The author now has a thesis—that the migrants will unite and overthrow their oppressors—and he wants to argue as if he weren’t quite sure of it himself … Yet one soon forgets the faults of the story. What one remembers most of all is Steinbeck’s sympathy for the migrants—not pity, for that would mean he was putting himself above them; not love, for that would blind him to their faults, but rather a deep fellow feeling. It makes him notice everything that sets them apart from the rest of the world and sets one migrant apart from all the others. (Marks, 2020).
- Of Mice and Men (1937).
John Steinbeck is no
mere virtuoso in the art of storytelling, but he is one. Whether he writes
about the amiable outcasts of Tortilla Flat or about the grim strikers of In
Dubious Battle, he tells a story. Of Mice and Men is a thriller, a gripping
tale running to novelette length that you will not set down until it is
finished. It is more than that, but it is that. The theme is not, as
the title would suggest, that the best-laid plans of mice and men gang aft
agley. They do this in this story as in others. But it is a play on the immemorial
theme of what men live by besides bread alone. Insure, raucous, vulgar
Americanism, Steinbeck has touched the quick in his little story.
- Rita Dove.
Rita Frances Dove (born August 28,
1952) is an American poet and author. From 1993–1995 she served as Poet
Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. She was the first
African American to be appointed since the position was created by an act of
Congress in 1986 out of the previous "consultant in poetry" position
(1937–86). Dove also received an appointment as a "special consultant in
poetry" for the Library of Congress's bicentennial year from 1999–2000.
Dove is the second African American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry,
in 1987, and she served as the Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2004–2006.
- The Darker Face of the Earth (revised stage version 1996).
- Through the Ivory Gate (Pantheon Books, 1992).
- Selected Poems (Pantheon/Vintage, 1993).
- E. L. Doctorow.
Edgar Lawrence Doctorow (January 6,
1931 – July 21, 2015) was an American novelist, editor, and professor, best
known internationally for his works of historical fiction. He has been
described as one of the most important American novelists of the 20th century.
Most important pieces of work:
- The Book of Daniel (1971).
Supposedly working on his doctoral thesis, Daniel instead produces notes toward an autobiographical novel about his Old-Left parents, Paul and Rochelle Isaacson, who in the early 1950s were electrocuted for passing atom-bomb secrets to the Russians … One contemplates most novels based on controversial public happenings with a sinking heart: fictionalization tends to trivialize such events: the public record weighs like sandbags on the imagination. But Mr. Doctorow has turned such liabilities into assets. He freely acknowledges the looming presence of the Rosenberg Case by building a high-tension bridge between reality and fiction. (Marks, Literary Hub., 2019).
- World’s Fair (1985).
By flaunting the artificial line dividing the truth from the imagined, Mr. Doctorow not only
suggests in World’s Fair that the process of remembering is by definition a
process of invention, but he also rejects altogether the notion that imagination and
memory are ever pure of each other. His purpose in World’s Fair seems to be to
create a work that succeeds as oral history, memoir, and novel all at once.
Unfortunately, these disparate genres don’t always make the best of bedfellows,
and until its breathtaking final 100 pages, when it becomes most fully
novelistic, Mr. Doctorow’s new novel seems as peculiar a mix of brilliant
vision and clumsy self-indulgence as the fair it so artfully describes.
- The March (2005).
A many-faceted
recounting of General William Tecumseh Sherman’s famous, and in some quarters
still infamous, the march of sixty-two thousand Union soldiers, in 1864-65, through
Georgia and then the Carolinas, it combines the author’s saturnine strengths
with elegiac compassion and prose of a glittering, swift-moving economy. The
novel shares with Ragtime a texture of terse episodes and dialogue shorn, in
avant-garde fashion, of quotation marks, but has little of the older book’s
distancing jazz, its impudent, mocking shuffle of facts; it celebrates its epic
war with the stirring music of a brass marching band heard from afar, then loud
and up close, and finally receding over the horizon.
- Amy Tan.
Amy Tan (born February 19, 1952) is an
American writer whose works explore mother-daughter relationships and the
Chinese-American experience. Her novel The Joy Luck Club was adapted into a
film in 1993 by director Wayne Wang.
Most important pieces of work:
- The Joy Luck Club (1989).
The Joy Luck Club is
a 1989 novel written by Amy Tan. It was also eventually turned into a short
story. It focuses on four Chinese American immigrant families in San Francisco
who start a club known as The Joy Luck Club, playing the Chinese game of
mahjong for money while feasting on a variety of foods.
- The Kitchen God's Wife (1991).
The Kitchen God's Wife is the second novel by Chinese-American author, Amy Tan. First published in 1991, it deals extensively with Sino-American female identity and draws on the story of her mother's life. The book was largely considered a commercial success, making bestsellers lists in several countries worldwide.
- The Hundred Secret Senses (1995).
The Hundred Secret
Senses is a bestselling 1995 novel by Chinese-American writer Amy Tan. It was
published by Putnam, and was shortlisted for the 1996 Orange Prize for Fiction.
While the story is fictional, it is based on the experiences of Tan and on
stories told by her mother.
VIDEO OF STEPHEN KING
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