Contemporary Literature and Criticism

Contemporary literature and criticism examines how fiction written from roughly the mid-twentieth century onward grapples with fragmented truth, unreliable institutions, and the collapse of shared cultural narratives — tendencies grouped under the broad label of postmodernism. Scholars trace these concerns through specific authors and texts, asking how writers like Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace use narrative experimentation not merely as aesthetic play but as a form of cultural diagnosis, probing consumerism, media saturation, and political paranoia. The field also attends to rupture: how a single historical event, such as the September 11 attacks, reshapes literary form and national memory, and how authors negotiate between ironic detachment and genuine emotional engagement. An active debate concerns whether the irony-heavy posture of postmodernism has given way to something newer — sometimes called metamodernism — and what that shift, if real, reveals about literature's evolving relationship to sincerity, politics, and collective experience.

Works

63,189

Total citations

230,333

Keywords

PostmodernismContemporary FictionThomas PynchonDavid Foster WallaceCultural CritiqueNarrative