Trends in Contemporary Literature

1
Trends in Contemporary Literature

• Examination of American Diversity
• Social Protest
• Changes in Philosophy

2
Examination of American Diversity

• Jewish Writers Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud,
  Joseph Heller, Phillip Roth
• African-American Writers Ralph Ellison, James
  Baldwin, Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, Toni
  Morrison (Beloved)
• Asian Writers Amy Tan (The Joy Luck Club)

3
Diversity continued

• Women Writers Sylvia Plath, Eudora Welty,
  Flannery OConnor
• Southern Renaissance William Styron, Robert Penn
  Warren, Flannery OConnor, Pat Conroy, John
  Grisham, Larry McMurtry Appalachian writers-Lee
  Smith, Charles Frazier (Cold Mountain)

4
Social Protest

• Includes many of the writers already listed
  racial equality, womens rights, economic
  justice.
• Protest against bureaucratization of our society,
  the result of military-industrial complex and
  growth of corporations revisionist view of World
  War II in Norman Mailers The Naked and the Dead
  , Thomas Pyncheons Gravitys Rainbow,
  Vonneguts Slaughterhouse Five, and Joseph
  Hellers Catch 22.

5
Social Protest

• Counter culture movement the Beat Generation,
  the Hippies, perhaps todays rap poets, perhaps
  todays cyberpunks
• Post-apocalyptic fiction Vonneguts Cats
  Cradle, Stephen Kings The Stand
• Perhaps all these reflect a disenchantment with a
  mass society, depersonalized by bureaucratization

6
Philosophy of a Nuclear Age

• Literature in our post-Modernist period has moved
  away from realism and allowed more interior
  states, more fantasy (Ally McBeal)
• Search for meaning Pyncheon and conspiracy
  theories, Bellow in Herzog
• New Journalism blending of genres,Truman Capote
  In Cold Blood, Hunter Thompson, Tom Wolfe A Man
  in Full--All reflect a search for meaning in a
  seemingly meaningless world (X-Files)