10-Oct-17

CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE:
PERSPECTIVES & ISSUES

Titien Diah Soelistyarini

Universitas Airlangga

SUPERSIGNIFICATIVE TERMS

1. Enabling various kinds of analysis

• everyday life, ideology and identity
2. Referring to analytical frameworks
• postmodernism, postcolonialism, globalization
3. Referring to oft-debated issues
• news, human rights, environmentalism

1
 10-Oct-17

FEATURES OF CONTEMPORARINESS

• Immediately meaningful and relevant in a large number of

contexts
• Accommodative of different contexts
• Gather expanding range of applications & meanings with use
• Mean more than a brief definition can suggest
• Inform each other and overlap
• Useful to describe contemporary lives and experience

EVERYDAY LIFE AND NEWS

• News is becoming more fiction-like; blurring the

boundary between reality and fiction in news
stories
• Depicting real events and characters (with news
photograph) in recent news within novel

2
 10-Oct-17

FACT OR FICTION???

Brown’s grin was fixed, as always, as a grimace; there was

some gurning, a movement that suggested chewing, the
clearing of a shred of tomato skin maybe from in front of his
bottom teeth; a hint that if anything upset his rather delicately
balanced equilibrium he could at any second and without
warning revert to being Bad Gordon – the Gordon of kicking
the furniture and control-freak tendencies; meanspirited,
domineering; the Gordon of the shaking hand, the clouded
mien, prone to sudden and terrible rages (Burn 2008, 90).

THE SIGNIFICANCE

• News determines significance by selecting events or people to

tell; everyday life as everyday flow against which the
significance & newsworthiness arises.
• News leaves out many aspects of everyday life involved when
the newsworthy events occurred.
• Newsworthiness – perception of such significance has to do
with how the news is produced and received.
• News as part of everyday life

3
 10-Oct-17

“Literary texts frequently create the illusion of being

records of everyday life.”

SO, CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE…

• Has a sense of familiarity and closeness

• Brings everyday experiences in the reading of
classics
• Evokes recent news as a time-honored way of
evoking the contemporary
• Impinges upon the everyday

4
 10-Oct-17

IDEOLOGY

1. Attaches to a collective
2. Emphasizes basic guiding principles
3. Depends on where they are advocated and by whom
4. Promoted and maintained by ideological state apparatuses
5. People locate themselves w/ dominant ideology

IDEOLOGY (CONT.)

6. Competition of ideologies
7. Entangles in everyday life
8. Regards performance & interpretation as important
9. Literary texts – written and circulated and read amidst
ideological arrangements and debates

5
 10-Oct-17

IDENTITY

• Implies considering the relations between such

groups: in terms of minorities and majorities,
power relations, rights and prerogatives, tensions
and conflicts.
• A matter of talking about the politics of, and social
attitudes to, identity

IDENTITY-BASED PERSPECTIVE

• the relevance of identity (gendered or other

kinds) in a literary text may arise from either the
content of the text or the associations brought by
a reader/viewer, or, most likely, from both.

6
 10-Oct-17

ESSENTIALIST AND
SOCIAL-CONSTRUCTIVIST

• What characterizes the gaze of the women in the

audience as a specifically female gaze?
• What distinguishes and brings together female
responses, and therefore suggests a gendered
identity at work in engaging with literature?
• Reconciliation between Biological Essentialism &
Social Constructivism

NORMS AND SYSTEMS

• Basis of an unequal relationship along the lines of

gender – and such norms and systems may also
explain unequal relationships along the lines of
race, class, religion, and so on, where they occur

7
 10-Oct-17

RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN IDENTITIES

• Each aspect of identity focused in a literary text may be

understood in relation to others.
• The Questions:
o Are there similarities in the relations between dominant and
dominated groups along the lines of, for instance, race, sexuality,
ethnicity, religion, and those along the lines of gender?
o What sort of joint commitments or disagreements may consequently
arise between different identity-based groupings?

VIEWER’S OR READER’S IDENTITY

An identity-led engagement with the literary work

is also an engagement with our own identities, and
therefore of how we understand our place in the
contemporary world.

8

MODERNISM V. POSTMODERNISM
MODERNISM
• associated with social
conditions and cultural
products wherein a coherent
perspective of the world is
sought – a coherent way of
linking all ideologies, identities
and everyday lives of our time
LITERARY DEVICES
MODERNISM
• often uses new (or
‘experimental’) devices that
systematically undermine
traditional literary
expectations (of plot and
structure, characterization,
style, etc.)
10-Oct-17
POSTMODERNISM
• involves being reconciled to
having different and
contradictory ideologies,
identities and experiences of
everyday life contending with
each other and co-existing, and
not needing to resolve these
within any single coherent
perspective
POSTMODERNISM
• Deliberately cultivate
inconsistency and an unsystematic
appearance
• Often juxtapose incommensurable
narratives, and court incompletion,
dissonant images, contradictions
(e.g. in plot, characterization, style),
fractured forms, irresolution, and
so on
9
 10-Oct-17

UNDERLYING SYSTEM

• The postmodern social condition, and cultural

expressions are, despite appearances, due to a
well-coordinated economic and political system –
a contemporary capitalist system

POSTCOLONIALISM V. GLOBALIZATION

Postcolonialism
• engages with contemporary
ideologies and identities by
examining the history and
effects of European
(primarily) colonial
expansion since the
sixteenth century (beyond
and within Europe)
Globalization
• Refers to processes of
integration towards the
development of a
worldwide order
• the study of globalization
involves the analysis of
such processes

10
 10-Oct-17

POSTCOLONIALISM & GLOBALIZATION

• extend a world-embracing way of thinking;

• have to do with large-scale social changes in, or relevant to,
the contemporary world;
• involve ideological convictions and political commitments of
contemporary moment; and
• provide methods for analyzing cultural productions and
receptions of various sorts, including literature.

POSTCOLONIALISM: THE ISSUES

1. Shadow of colonial history, both within and across nations –

cast on contemporary intl and national events at various levels
2. Colonial & postcolonial system – colonialist moral objectives
(white man’s burden) usually used to hide the economic and
political self-interests of powerful countries
3. Colonial relations work through differences in identity
4. Effect at different levels – distortions of colonial inequities and
attitudes are felt not only within the colonized, but also the
colonizer

11
 10-Oct-17

POSTCOLONIALISM: THE ISSUES

5. Colonial Domination: Prejudice & Desire

6. Decolonization & Hybridity
7. Reiteration through postcolonialism – overlooking other
contemporary circumstances not entirely rooted in colonial
history

GLOBALIZATION: THE ISSUES

1. Anti-globalization
2. Inevitability of global integration
3. Vision of globalized world
4. Access across boundaries

12
 10-Oct-17

HUMAN RIGHTS

• Universal
• Primarily a matter of protections from and by powerful
organizations
• Maintained by statement of binding agreement

HUMAN RIGHTS IN CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

• Examining situations where human rights are violated or

appear contentious in some way.
• Used to address the ambiguities and disputes about human
rights
• Not simply used to consider particular debates about human
rights; in fact, in general constantly exploring what it means
to be human and clarifying the very basis on which human
rights are contemplated

13
 10-Oct-17

WHAT IT MEANS TO BE HUMAN AND

CONTEMPLATION OF UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS

1. Individualized Evil
2. Concepts of Purity and the Absolute
3. The Role of Bureaucracy
4. Genocidal Everyday Life
5. The Transferable Conditions of Genocide
6. The Universality of Humankind
7. Statements and Stakes

ENVIRONMENTALISM

• Associated with ‘ecological awareness’ and being ‘green’

• Commonly refers to an area of social activism that seeks to:
1. Understand the effects of human activities (particularly industrial
and technological activities) on the natural environment; and
2. Campaign for policies that enhance the conservation and
sustainability of our natural environment and improve
environmental conditions where these are depleted

14
 10-Oct-17

ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT ON LITERATURE

(THROUGH ECOCRITICISM OR ENVIRONMENTAL CRITICISMS)

1. Raising awareness
2. Providing a useful arena for engaging with the question
regarding the ideal environmental condition to achieve
3. Reconsidering cultural attitudes
4. Reconsidering literature

What it means to be human,

and what our relationship with the
natural environment entails
are matters that are of constant and
ongoing relevance in all contexts.

15