Literary Times

They Are A-Changin’ — Always

POST VIA LIBERATION LIT

Do we live in metamodern literary times — a cross between the modern and postmodern? This is the subject of a recent article “How Metamodernism Can Save Us All” by Thaddeus Thomas at the Republic of Letters — which is a new liberal online literary magazine.

As virtually all the genres of novels and literature show, including the literary genre, the Enlightenment and Victorian age in imaginative writing never ended — and for that matter, the Renaissance too — still going strong. Modernism, postmodernism, etc, can even appear to be wrinkles upon the brow of Enlightenment and Victorian era lit, and the Renaissance.

Public and private meaning never left the building of literature. It did fragment, diversify, and expand, roughly in accord with social conditions and varied expressions of individual opportunity and genius, marketing fashion and publishing constraints.

So here we are today, but where is that? Look at the changed and changing social conditions and the varied expressions of individual opportunity and genius, marketing fashion and publishing constraints.

See the godsend of diversity and instantly accessible information and knowledge and the people’s media. See genocide and climate collapse, inequality and oppression perpetrated — by whom? — by the plutocracy, by capital, and by their social commanders and cultivated shock troops grinding society to pieces.

So are we an age of rebirth (R)? An age of conceptual and political revolution (E)? An age of social comprehension (V)? An age of private and theoretical obsession (M & PM) that flees the military police state, the plutocrat propaganda and power?

Or are we a mix of all that, plus increasingly a new people’s age of interconnectivity and engagement, continuously asserted human rights, including full democracy, against the omnicidal rise of the Anthropocene and the plutocracy?

We had better be the latter, in some profound liberatory, progressive populist, or revolutionary push or there will be no civilization to host literary movements at all.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Anthropocene originated about the same time, middle of last century, and their promise and carnage are increasingly coming to bear in this new age of the people’s media, interconnectivity, and populism — whether retrograde and supremacist, or progressive, liberatory, and revolutionary.

Literary movements can choose to be reflective, conceptual, or visionary — and detached or engaged — in regard to social conditions and individual or group expression. It’s what creators make it, and it’s what publishing and literary organs cultivate and emphasize.

From rebirth, into enlightenment, into social engagement, into privacy, play, and diversity, into, now — the all-out fight for human rights and against the collapse of the Anthropocene in an increasingly interconnected age of the people’s media — what kind of movements in literature does that stimulate and demand?

Literary populist partisans know exactly what they are committed to — rebirth, enlightenment, and social engagement, with good diversity and some private or playful focus — all the best power of the past — with a current basis and edge in human rights populism and revolution — summoning all the powers of the past, present, and future for the task at hand. Call it whatever you will — liberatory, revolutionary, populist, anti-omnicidal, global, anti-Empire.

Creators work in other diverting ways, which can be lively and nourishing too. As form comes from content in art, literary movements come from social, cultural, and intellectual conditions, forces, and imperatives.

Other literary manifestations are manufactured by wealth-backed publishing industries and ideologies, for which the rise of the people’s media at its best affords less and less tolerance.

Leading literary movements must be more than a blend of the past, though they will be also that. Crucial and gripping new literary movements should incorporate and expand upon the changed and changing conditions in the most vital and imperative ways. It’s what the full human creature in new times, novel times, demands. It’s what the full human person in both its individual and collective realities and manifestations, conceptions and possibilities insists upon and can create in and against the prevailing culture and society.

Once you get grounded in the times, in yourself and your groups, and your broad understandings, you can create story from there. What it’s likely to be is anyone’s guess, but all the streams of life and literature are highly visible today and refracted in the infinite opinions of people and the populace like never before, both fracturing and enforcing empire that shapes society, whether by towers of Babel or by the fertilizing and restoring floods of people’s consciousness and power.

There is no definitive theory of literature except that it’s what people make it. You can talk about what it is and what it was, what it is thought to be, and what it ought to be. And you should, for all kinds of reasons. But then, or first, go make it, if you’re an imaginative writer. Render the conceptual material. Create the consciousness of the time, if you like, by a conscious or unconscious conception expressed as experience and artefact, as story, that compelling mix of experience and knowledge.

Only the “metamodern” will be metamodern. The rest of us, the rest of the world will be something else. Many will write in a more civic focused stream of literature while others will write primarily in the rhetorical.

POST VIA LIBERATION LIT