Upcoming Conferences

“What was Contemporary Literature?”

Conveners: Laura Bieger & Philipp Löffler

Ruhr-Universität Bochum / Universität Heidelberg

Program

30 years ago, David Foster Wallace declared the ends of postmodernist irony by announcing a turn to sincerity in American fiction that has shaped discussions about the nature of the contemporary ever since. “The next real literary ‘rebels’ in this country,” Wallace speculated, “might well emerge as some weird bunch of ‘anti-rebels,’ born oglers who dare to back away from ironic watching, who have the childes gall actually to endorse single-entendre values.” “These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naïve, anachronistic.” Whatever one may think of Wallace’s claim, in hindsight it does seem to capture a variety of literary movements ‘after’ postmodernism in the 1990s defining what we have come to call ‘the contemporary’: neo-realism, new sincerity, a high cultural turn to genre fiction, a return to authenticity and history proper, to name but a few. But while Wallace’s essay was prognostic in tenor, tentatively projecting the future of US literature, our sense of what we still understand as the contemporary has become historical by now. The period “formerly known as contemporary” (Hungerford) has come to a close, allowing scholars to historicize systematically what authors writing in the wake of the Cold War could only vaguely anticipate. This moment of historical self-reflexivity is the occasion for this conference.