3.1: Historical/Cultural Overview

American Literature since 1945

• American writers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries embrace a hybrid English enriched by words borrowed from other cultures. They write stories that stretch across the bounds of time and place, beyond the United States and the present moment.
• Literature increasingly blends the academic and the popular. The dominant ethos of American literature written since 1945 is that of experimentation as new readers and new writers transform the literary past into new, blended forms.

New Readers, New Writers, New Heroes

• World War II introduced millions in the armed services to literature; these soldiers read literary classics even as they encountered the foreign languages and cultures of Europe, North Africa, India, and Japan. The GI Bill enabled these individuals to pursue a college education when they returned from war.
• An influx of scholars and intellectuals who fled the war and resettled in the United States brought a new awareness of French, German, and Russian literature.
• Beginning in the 1940s, the New Criticism—an attention to the formal characteristics of a text—shaped the work of writers like Flannery O'Connor and the questions asked by literary scholars.
• Many Americans resisted the cosmopolitan and complex literary works produced by this global turn, and books such as Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita were banned.
• During the second half of the twentieth century, African Americans increasingly wrote for a national audience, questioning the philosophy, psychology, and policies of white supremacy. James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, and other black writers indicted American racism.
• Literature increasingly celebrated nonconforming outsiders; these outsiders were often misfits and antiheroes who failed to achieve their dreams. Nonconformists advocated for a counterculture or for new cultural norms.
• Women writers objected to conformities of race, education, religion, and gender. Collective projects brought these writers together in anthologies and new institutions.
• Writers portrayed—and participated in—dietary, sexual, social, and artistic experimentation. Stylistic innovations attempted to make readers feel that they had experienced the wild subjects they wrote about. Unconventionality became a new convention.

Literature and American Media

• New media developed after World War II competed with traditional forms of writing but also enriched and transformed literature. Media theorist Marshall McLuhan argued that "the media is the message" and drew new attention to forms of transmission as being of equally important as the content transmitted.
• The television brought disturbing images and news into millions of homes, challenging viewers to do more than passively receive broadcast messages.
• Avant-garde theater demanded that audience members create art, rather than simply consume it, doing away with the fourth wall—or the separation between audience and actors—in an increasing number of productions. Similarly, reality TV provides the illusion of art or entertainment arising from the everyday lives of ordinary people.
• Poets also sought to make their art participatory, rather than an object of passive consumption. Poets read their work out loud, emphasizing emotion, improvisation, and musicality.
• Fiction was also read out loud, but more often it was adapted into Hollywood films and television series.

Experiment and Play in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Literature

• The term "postmodern" has been used to represent a variety of ideas and styles. Many agree that postmodern life and literature is fragmented, a babble of multiple voices that leaves the reader in ambiguity and uncertainty; the postmodern invites a range of interpretations.
• Postmodern poetry is playful, refusing to refer in predictable ways to the material world. Its meanings are elusive, and readers are encouraged to appreciate other aspects of the poem—sound, color, feeling, connotations.
• The realism of the nineteenth century has given way, since 1945, to confessional poetry and unvarnished autobiography, language recounting banal experiences unabashedly.
• Even as writers attempt to stir readers' affections, they always hold something in reserve and write satirically, ironically.

Literature Now

• Today literature is defined by both massive production—over 60,000 novels are published each year—and a diffuse, global readership familiar with a variety of English usages. The scale of production necessarily creates a fragmented audience; not everyone can read the same books.
• The rise of the Internet and digital culture has also made English and English literature ubiquitous. The Web privileges some forms of literature (narratives broken into short, scrollable chapters or sections, for instance) and is shaping the future of literature.