Section A Critical Quotations

from Hyde and Wasserman 2017

Terry Smith 2009: contemporary art

Contemporary art’s immediacy, its interest in itself as contemporary “signifies multuple ways of being with, in and out of time, seperately and at once with others and without them

skrebowski 2016: transnational

the idea of the contemporary as a “global commodity” gives rise to art’s existence in a “transnational, perpetual present

Wasserman and Hyde: how to approach the contemporary

“and so to grasp the futility of the term and expose its limits we propose not a list of writers to watch or a set of theoretical approaches…but a consideration of methods

Neoliberalism in contemporary

refers to the 20th century intensification of 19th century ideas associated with laissez-faire economic liberalism

From an understanding of neoliberalism “as the dominant contemporary financial order—one that is therefore materially present in contemporary fiction”

2 ways contemporary can approach neoliberalism

“Contemporary fiction can be resistant, critiquing current economic structures and practices or…it can be reflective, narrating from a position within the economic order”

Rachel Greenwald Smith 2015: neoliberalism

Bc neoliberalism lauds privatisation above all, all literature that shows “impersonal feelings”, that are difficult to individually assign, “challenges neoliberalism’s hegemony”

Literary infrastructure

“the rising interest in literary infrastructure: best-of lists, bestsellers, goodreads, reviews, download data and the rise of self-publishing and fan-fiction”

Amy Hungerford 2016: literary infrastructure

Sketches “a present tense archive” made up from a mosaic of actors from “Readers, writers, editors, scholars and internet users”

Pascale Casanova 1999: global circulation

How the global circulation of literary value could rearrange the national boundaries of literary study and this approach promises future work that scales up from the nation to the globe”

Timothy Melley 2012: freedom and security

how the status of contemporary changed under the US security state’s emphasis on secrecy and deception e.g books like Margaret Atwood

Scott Selisker, Human programming, 2016: human unfreedom

tracks the American discourse of unfreedom as it intersects with the histories of computation, communication, cybernetics and militarism

Contemporary and the Anthropocene

Think ab the contemporary “in relation to planetary of geologic time”

Minimises the compulsion to periodise by historical or economic amrkers and reinforces some of those very markers”

Timothy Morton 2013: the anthropocene

A geological time marked by the decisive human ‘terraforming’ of earth as such”

Kate Marshall: anthropocene novels and time

On defining ‘what are the novels of the Anthropocene’ argues that “recent novels do some of the most sophisticated explorations of environmental condition by staging their own temporality within expanded time scales”

Ursula K. Heise 2008: spatial and conceptual environment

Environmental thinking to do with not sense of place but a “less territorial and more systematic sense of planet”

Aamir Mutfi 2016: world lit and colonialism

Tells a new story of the geneaology of world literature, with “beginnings in orientalist philosophy” —these colonial origins means that we cannot forget that English is not a politically neutral “global literary vernacular”

[Cites texts from authors such as Salman Rushdie and Kamila Shamsie—> “south asian anglophone novels”

[agaisnt Mufti] Rebecca Walkowitz 2015: world lit

English’s dominance as a starting point, arguing that much contemporary literature begins as World Literature entering new markets and published into multiple languages at the same time

Cites texts from Mohsin Hamid, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ben Lerner who “take translation as an inspiration or a medium—not as a second-order operation”

The Warwick Research Collective: Post-colonial critique

Postcolonial critique of contemporary allows scholars to examine world lit in light of world systems; WReC argues against a “level playing field” of comparison in favour of viewing how “the combined and uneven developments of capitalism provides a more rigorous foundation from which to examine not just the category of world literature, but also its forms”

Pedro Erber 2013: transnational flows

The contemporary as “the active sharing of time that informs the transnational flow of culture in our global present”

contemporary and globalisation

Tnot an economic phenomenon with a built-in geographical metaphor—the globe—to contein it, but a shared time that cannot deny the alterity and heterogeneity within the contemporary”

Terry Smith 2010: difference

difference has become increasingly contemporary with more of us aware of what is essentially different along with what is shared, relative to others”

Large questions and intersectionality

    “do these various ‘macro’ appraoches to the contemporary—those with ecological, geopolitical, and even planetary impetus—allow for the preservation of alterity? Or must they eradicate difference in the name in the name of a larger collective?”—see Natalie Diaz and Layli Longsong

-       “How can scholars study and teach specific, often racialised literary histories so that they are seen as central to all literary history without dissolving into an undifferentiated, idealised multiculturalism”

2 significant post paradigms

The post-human

The post-critique

Post-human

Decentring the human in favour of concern for the nonhuman

Stepping outside residual humanism

Post-criticism

“But Post-critical work like Rita Felski’s, even as it advocates for a turn away from the hermeneutics of suspicion, paranoid reading, and attention to a text’s ‘depths, acknowledges the intimate and messy entanglements of human readers and reading practices”

Contemporary form and temporality

P “despite the multiple clocks used to periodise the contemporary, there is a share concern with time and temporality in both criticism and fiction”, this is “revealing of form itself within the contemporary”

Peter Osborne 2013: overlapping time

Peter Osborne 2013: on contemporaneity, “the present as being above all concerned with the coming together of multiple, disjunctive times”

Addressing the past

   “Contemporary novels often revisit and revise the past through explicitly formal means and that they do this not to break from the past but to interrogate its continuities with the present”

-       It “often invokes multiple features and timescales, staging the multiplicity and discrepancy of those times through formal means”—> see Ali Smith

Historicity and historiography

      Cont lit “demands attention to form that does not foreclose historicism in the interest of aesthetics but rather shows how form itself can be active in time”

Aul

-       The turn to “formal experiment and generic play bears a relation to modernism, it is not bc these fictions are invested in making it new. Rather, they are consumed with time tiself, and if not with historicity, then perhaps with historiography, with the telling and writing of history”

Paul Rabinow 2008: the past in the present

The contemporary moves “through the recent past and the near future in a (nonlinear) space that gauges modernity as an ethos already becoming historical”