Contemporary American Literature
American Literature of the twenty first century remains in progress; however, much of it
has continued the exploration of American identity and claims to justice began at the origin of the
American experiment. New conflicts and challenges emerge, of course, such as 9/11 and the
current wars in the Middle East, but these are new manifestations of perennial problems—how to
defend America’s sovereignty, how to find our place in the world, how to stake out our identity.
Amidst these new challenges come new literary forms, such as television, film, and video games
—continuing to expand the canon and offer new creative avenues.
Writers such as Billy Collins and Sherman Alexie adapt continued American concerns to
new humorous tones. Collins is reminiscent of twentieth-century poets Carl Sandburg, E. E.
Cummings, and Robert Frost in the way he can reach popular-reading audiences while still
maintaining respect in academic circles. His poems deal with ordinary things that he subjects to
thoughtful, often humorous scrutiny.
Sherman Alexie, a Spokane/Coeur d’Alene Indian, was born on the Spokane Reservation.
Smoke Signals, a film for which Alexie wrote the screenplay, won two awards at the Sundance
Film Festival in 1998, and brought a worldwide audience to his work. Writing in the wake of the
Native American Renaissance, Alexie brings humor and a look at contemporary Native American
life. Born a hydrocephalic, Alexie was not expected to live, and then was expected to be
retarded; yet he could read by age three. By age 40, he had published nine books of poetry, three
books of stories, two anthologies of each, and two screenplays.
His irony and dark humor invite his audience into the world of the reservation, and the
humor helps the non-Native American to understand modern Native experience in a way not
presented before. Alexie’s characters are universally human, yet at the same time distinctively
Native American. His poetic eye offers a distinct vision of reservation life, as does the rhythm of
the language, but it is a contemporary view allowing for the sophistication of the culture.
Alcoholism, a prominent problem among Native Americans, comes up frequently in his work, as
do the more general social and economic difficulties of continuing to live as a partly segregated
minority within American society.
Multiculturalism continues to play a major role in American literary studies, allowing a
space for all people to speak. As such writers like Yusef Komunyakaa find their voice.
Komunyakaa was born James William Brown but later assumed his traditional family name
(which had been discarded when the family migrated to the United States), served in combat in
Vietnam in 1965 and later used his Vietnam experiences as a major motif in his poetry. Life in the
rural South during the era of segregation, the context in which he lived during his childhood and
adolescence, is another important subject for his poetry.
These questions of identity surface again and again in the texts we’ll study written after
the turn of the twenty-first century, because of the continuing cultural clashes and because of the
social, economic, and political structures in which we find ourselves.
Post-Civil War American Literature, A Retrospection
Looking back on the literature written in America since the Civil War, what do we see?
How do we make sense of it? We have a number of writers to consider: Twain, James, Dreiser,
Freeman, Eliot, Hughes, Collins, the list goes on. . . what holds these writers together? What
holds their works together into any coherent whole?
We can first consider how much has changed over this time, noting the different
characteristics of each literary era as shown on these notes about Realism, Naturalism,
Modernism, and Postmodernism.
Realistic Period of American Literature: 1860-1900
Content:
Social issues, including women' rights, poverty, the inequities of Big Government,
mental illness, big city crime, among others
Surface details, common actions, minor catastrophes of middle-class society
Attention on the immediate, the here & now
Style:
Physical detail, appealing to all five senses
Point of view was neutral and relatively objective in comparison to previous literature
Mostly short stories & novels (fiction), very little poetry or drama
Characters:
Ordinary people doing ordinary things, such as businessmen, janitors, nurses, among
others
Major Writers:
Mark Twain
Henry James
Themes
Characters
Conditioned and controlled by environment, heredity, chance, or instinct
Frequently, but not invariably, poor, uneducated, unsophisticated characters
William Dean Howells
Other minor writers, including Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Bret
Harte, & Charles Chesnutt
Naturalistic Period of American Literature: 1900-1914
Definition & Characteristics
oApplies scientific principles of objectivity and detachment to a study of
human beings
oImplies a philosophical position of human beings as physical objects that can
be studied in relationship to their surroundings
oPeople are products of their circumstances, economic status, society,
biological heredity
o Determinism
The “brute within” each individual, comprised of strong and often warring
emotions: passions, such as lust, greed, or the desire for dominance or pleasure; and the fight
for survival in an amoral, indifferent universe
Nature as an antagonistic force acting on the lives of human beings
Forces of fate and chance as they affect—and afflict—individual lives
Futile attempts of human beings to exercise free will, often ironically
presented, in a universe that reveals free will as an illusion
o
o
o
o
o
o
Practitioners
Frank Norris
Stephen Crane
Jack London
Theodore Dreiser
Modernistic Period of American Literature: 1914-1945
Definition & Characteristics
Experimentation in all aspects of art
Perspectivism: locating of meaning from the viewpoint of the individual; the use of
narrators located within the action of the fiction, experiencing from a personal, particular
perspective; the use of many voices; the disappearance of the omniscient narrator
Impressionism: emphasis on the process of perception and knowing: the use of
devices to present more closely the texture or process or structure of knowing and
perceiving.
Themes
Alienation, Isolation, & Rootlessness
Breakdown of traditions, traditional values, the family unit
Quest for salvation or identity
Pessimistic & Despairing Attitude
Question of the reality of experience itself
Practitioners
TS EliotRobert Frost
Ezra PoundWilliam Carlos Williams
Themes
ee CummingsErnest Hemingway
Langston HughesWilliam Faulkner
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Postmodern Period of American Literature: 1945-Present
Definition & Characteristics
Modernism carried to the extreme
Anti-establishment
Blurring of boundaries
Black humor & literature of the absurd
Metafiction
Celebrates fragmentation (where modernism would find it tragic & offer art as a
means for continuity & unity)
Laughs at the meaninglessness of life
“Mini-narratives,” which are situational and temporary, making no claim to
universality, truth, reason, or stability.
Examines (deconstructs) organization of knowledge
Practitioners
Allen GinsbergArthur Miller
Eudora WeltyTennessee Williams
John UpdikeFlannery O’Connor
Theodore RoethkeKurt Vonnegut
Elizabeth Bishop
We can also focus on what threads run throughout these works rather than on what
divides them: identity, equality, racial relations, gender issues, peace, freedom, war, justice.
These issues surface again and again in American literature—from Daisy Miller’s search for
herself in the European environment, to Hughes’s questioning what it means to be black in
America, from Flannery O’Connor’s depiction of injustice and foolishness to Billy Collins’
exploration of the limits of artistic expression. What binds American literature is more powerful
than what separates it. To adapt T. S. Eliot’s statement about literature, “No [American] poet, no
[American] artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is
the appreciation of his relation to the [past American] poets and artists. You cannot value him
alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among [his peers.]”
