Fiction: The 1980s to the Present

Contemporary fiction has become one of the most active fields in literary studies. Writers who forged a postmodern sensibility or style, such as Thomas Pynchon and Toni Morrison, still receive considerable scholarly attention, but the past decade has seen a profusion of critical work on more recent writers, such as Michael Chabon, Teju Cole, Junot Díaz, Jennifer Egan, Bret Easton Ellis, Jonathan Franzen, Rachel Kushner, Ben Lerner, Richard Powers, David Foster Wallace, Colson Whitehead, Dave Eggers, George Saunders, Jesmyn Ward, and Karen Tei Yamashita, among others, sometimes within only a few years of publication of their novels. One aim of the criticism seems to be to understand our current moment, whereas the fiction of postmodernism, which had its heyday from the 1960s through the 1980s, has largely receded into the historical past. As a result, the sense of the contemporary, which had at one time designated the post-World War II period overall, now more commonly refers to the past three decades.

One way to see this shift is in generational terms. Postmodern writers such as Morrison, Pynchon, and Joan Didion were typically born in the 1930s and became prominent in the 1960s and 1970s, and they were followed by writers from the Vietnam generation, such as Tim O'Brien and Ann Beattie, born in the 1940s and becoming prominent in the 1970s and 1980s. However, since around 1990 a new generation of writers, roughly born from the late 1950s through the 1970s, has taken the field. They came of age not in the midst of Woodstock and the 1960s but during the recession of the late 1970s and the conservative reaction of the 1980s, conferring a different sensibility. They fall into what some call the Punk Generation or Generation Jones (born around 1960) and Generation X (born roughly from 1965–80). In addition, the past few years have seen the emergence of "Millennial fiction" by writers born during the 1980s and 1990s, such as Ling Ma, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Ocean Vuong, as well as Sally Rooney in Europe, which augurs a further adjustment of the dial of the contemporary. In general, rather than depicting conspiracy running through American life as many postmodern writers did, these contemporary writers are more concerned about neoliberal economic conditions, climate change, the ubiquity of digital technologies, and the complications of multicultural identity. And rather than parody, a major mode of postmodernists, they tend to be sincere, forging "autofiction," which blends fiction, memoir, and the essay, and often employ realist modes. And rather than dwelling on the divide between high and low art, they readily mix the two, using mainstream genres with more literary ones.

These waves of fiction have been met by a new cohort of critics, which is in the process of characterizing its chief tendencies, forms, themes, and politics. Notable critics include Stephen J. Burn, Amy Elias, Jane Elliott, Andrew Hoberek, Mitchum Huehls, Adam Kelly, David James, Lee Konstantinou, Annie McClanahan, Mark McGurl, and Rachel Greenwald Smith, among others, participating in groups such as the Association for the Study of Arts of the Present (ASAP) and publishing in the new online journal of the group, ASAP/Journal (launched in 2017); publishing in the online journals Post45: Peer Review, or in the collective's online forum, Post45: Contemporaries; and in book series such as Post45 (Stanford) and the New American Canon (Iowa). They generally are less concerned about making large theoretical surmises and more concerned with describing and mapping this new fiction. While there is usually a substantial lag before a work attracts scholarship, allowing time for critics to adjudicate its literary value, these critics often aim for a real-time study of current work and practices, more like social science disciplines that study current phenomena or like art criticism that might discuss current art and practices as well as contribute to art history. The fields of scholarly criticism and literary journalism had largely taken separate tracks since the 1940s, but this shift perhaps suggests a more public-facing academic stance, looking at writing that is immediately relevant to the current world. For instance, the clusters "Critique...