Presentation on “Contemporaneity”

On May 16, 2019, Mark Algee-Hewitt, Xander Manshel, Laura McGrath, Nichole Nomura, JD Porter, Matt Warner presented their project, "Contemporaneity."

What might it look like to consider the “contemporary” in “contemporary fiction” as a marker not of history, nor of literary history, but of form? If the category of historical fiction denotes, à la Genette, any narrative “that is explicitly placed (even by only date) in a historical past, even a very recent one,” then what terms and conventions best describe fiction that is decidedly not “placed” in the near or far past, set instead in the amorphous now? This presentation outlines and investigates what we are calling “the novel of contemporaneity,” one that takes place in the vague present, unattached from a particular period or year. Looking closely at a corpus of novels in English from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries, we examine how these categories might combine and overlap in interesting ways. What features attach a novel to a particular time? And does the absence of these features place a novel in the amorphous present?