1. BillyxRansom

    BillyxRansom Active Member

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    Is there a dominating literary movement in the 21st century?

    Discussion in 'Discussion of Published Works' started by BillyxRansom, Feb 9, 2010.

    And I don't mean vampire fiction.

    Anything that could be seen as important? Maybe post-9/11 literature is the dominating "movement" these days, but the idea of writing about that seems to be a little self-righteous to me.
     
  2. Gallowglass

    Gallowglass Contributor Contributor

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    I haven't really noticed them. Your example is probably only dominant in America, I expect it's nowhere near as 'popular,' for want of a better word, outside of that. It would obviously vary from country to country, and even nation to nation - and even then I can't think of any, in a nation of a hundred and fifty thousand people.
     
  3. thirdwind

    thirdwind Member Contest Administrator Reviewer Contributor

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    Literary movements really aren't defined until decades after that movement is over. But, for right now, we can assume that we are living in a post-modern literary world.
     
  4. Irish87

    Irish87 New Member

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    I'm seeing a lot of "I'm an intellectual, look at me" books, but I certainly don't know if it's a movement or not. It could just be a group of idiots who decided it was best to trick people into believing they're qualified to tell them how to live. Meh. I just read Thomas Sowell to balance it all out.
     
  5. arron89

    arron89 Banned

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    I think Postmodernism is still pretty dominant in literary fiction...writng is getting a little more diverse, but even popular fiction draws heavily on Postmodern stylistic features, so I'm going with that.

    Content-wise, I think the post-9/11 idea is one of the big influences on literary fiction, but I don't know that its universal enough to be considered a stylistic shift.
     
  6. Daniel Michael Morgan

    Daniel Michael Morgan New Member

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    I don't think that there is a dominant literary movement. What I see is an increased commercialization of writing which boils most pop fiction down to the lowest common denominator in order to sell more books and stories. There is a tendency to hook readers by placing a lot of action sequences throughout a story which works well with the short attention spans that we have all developed in our media saturated lives.

    Another theme that I see is increased market segmentation where written works are increasingly fragmented to appeal to a small niche. We live in this "I" culture where we all think that everything we consume should be tailored to our specific tastes. Fiction has not escaped this trend, so, just as in music, it has been broken down into numerous sub genres. Sure there are those best sellers that attract a wide audience and can achieve mass appeal, but fiction is trending towards increased segmentation.
     
  7. ManhattanMss

    ManhattanMss New Member

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    I'm not sure post-9/11 is so much a movement as an influence. What took place on 9/11, I think, shifted our perception of time and rationality in a way that has only been underscored repeatedly since then. Nothing's carved in stone anymore in terms of the kind of confidence that drives us forward--misplaced or not--into a future we can envision. Whether to serve as a useful objective or to resist in order to define ourselves, the illusion of a well organized destiny of some kind has been splintered if not shattered. I believe in the coming years, there will be an identifiable thematic shift in literature that ties to 9/11 as a reflection of the way we think, although it need not focus upon the event itself.

    I also see an influence from internet on literary fiction, which is not to say its topicality is the most important aspect. But internet has forever changed our way of thinking about what's real (and who) and what's imagined, what's fact and fiction, what's truth and what's entirely fabricated, and to call into question where the distinction lies and whether any of these kinds of arguable differences matter anyway. Maybe more importantly, we now have a generation who may not be able to imagine life without it. That's huge!

    Then there's the global culture and world community to consider. That's new and different, too, and influences how we think in ways that are unique to this era, but which we're not necessarily even conscious of. I really don't doubt there will be evidence of a rather blatant shift in thematics and sensibilities that will someday be discussed in conversations about literature and tied directly to the era we're living in right now.

    All these and plenty of things I haven't even thought of will influence the writing of our time (as have cultural changes of the past done their thing to define the literature of a given era and distinguish it from what went before and what came next).
     

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