Reading around

We write about some of the most popular and interesting tendencies within modern literature

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Diversity

By Emma Kristensen

Futuristic political literature is a good way to consider a problem from a distance and it can become a type-problem.  In this way, often no names are mentioned that can be directly linked to our today world. In this way, no one will feel directly attacked but perhaps they will feel so little attacked that they won't even notice that they are being criticized and won't notice that they are part of the problem. A way to avoid that is to make the literature realistic and have it take place today with today's problems.

Diversity has been a big subject lately. Be that in gender, ethnicity, color, disability, sexuality, body or the like. Especially in the media there is a big focus on loving your body as it is. Nigerian writer   Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie is a renowned feminist who in her book Americanah deal with many of these issues. The most prominent is the problem of poor representation of a group. She talks in her TED-talk about how important representation is. She didn't see a lot of cultural or geographic diversity in the literature she read and found it difficult to find anything to relate to as a young Nigerian girl. When there is only one or a few stories depicting a group of people or a place, that story is going to affect how people see those people or that place. She calls it the danger or a single story. I have personally only had a single story of African countries, which is the NGO commercials about hunger, but that changed with this novel which takes place both in Nigeria and in the USA.

When Adichie was a young girl she started writing stories about people talking about the weather and eating apples, even though people in Nigeria don’t need to talk about the weather and would more likely eat mangos, as this was the way of life she was presented with in the books she read She came to think that that was how literature was supposed to be, foreign and difficult to relate to . In the same way the people in the novel seem to think prestige is connected to things  related to the western world. There is an overall perception of not being sufficient. Being called mixed is a compliment, being a black American seems to be higher status than just being African, and the norm is for the mothers to go to either USA or England to have their babies so that they can become citizens there. But when the main character goes to the USA she experiences becoming a black person and no longer just a person. Here she experiences that it doesn’t have prestige being a black person in USA. She is mistaken for the help when she visits her white boyfriends’ wealthy parents and in order to get a job she has to get her hair relaxed.

However, she becomes part of a movement of women who are tired of having to hide away their natural hair to become employed. She starts taking care of her natural hair and embracing who she is, her body and her Nigeria. This is in other words a reinvention of the African image in the outside world and perhaps in a way a reinvention of themselves. There are many political issues taken up like racism, women’s role in Nigerian culture, and the image of African people in the western world. This novel alters the story told of Nigeria in the western world and brings more diversity to the image we see when we think of Nigeria. Adichie effectively breaks with the idea of not being sufficient.

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The Critical Novel

By Ditte Plauborg Larsen

Irish author Louise O’Neill’s most known works deal with some of our most current political issues across the globe: gender politics. In her novel Only Ever Yours (2014), she combines this aspect with the dystopian future and a general critique towards our society in terms of both gender politics and the general view of women, climate politics, and our usage of social media.

One of the more pronouncedly critical YA-works of our time, Only Ever Yours seems somewhat darker than most YA-fiction. In a wrecked world, divided into zones across the world instead of countries, the few remaining human beings struggle to survive in a biological hazard-zone; there are no animals left, no nature to mention (also because there are unexplained complications about being outdoors), and no longer any natural-born women. This means that women are grown in laboratories with no parents or attachments, bred to be either wives, concubines, or teachers for the future generations of girls.

This also means that women are created to be perfect, and trained to remain so. The interactions between the 30-some teenage girls the reader follows, eerily remind of what one may experience in our own world, taken to the extreme; likes on social media, beauty-tips, dieting and self-hating about eating, and, most importantly, the constant competition about being better, prettier and skinnier.

One of the most explicitly stated issues about gender specifically is the fact that all women have names spelled with non-capitalised letters; the main character, freida, for example. This relatively small but very strong effect shows women as being less than man, first of all, but not even good enough to have a proper name, just a means of identification. This is also apparent in the fact that the female teachers address the girls with numbers, freida’s being “Eve #630”. This lack of identity, which is forced on girls and women is also seen in similar gender-political works, such as Margaret Atwoods The Handmaids Tale (1985), where women also only play the roles of mothers and breeders in a dystopian future.

For the reader wanting a somewhat easily read, yet entirely deep and moving work of literature, focused on political matters, Louise O’Neill is definitely an author to consider. Her works are meaningful, but not cryptic; powerful, but accessible, even for the inexperienced reader and newly analytical student, who will definitely gain from the experience of reading her works. Only Ever Yours carries some heavy messages and burdens, and does so to show the critical perspective. This is one of literatures strengths, and shows the power of the author. Just as the classic dystopian novel can work as a wake-up call for us to remember our planet, the critical novel points our attention to the parts of society that needs improvement, and can be a part of spreading an idea and a wish for change.

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A technological idyll

By Cecilie Gehlert Madsen

One of the contemporary voices of Danish fiction, Kaspar Colling Nielsen, introduces his reader to a European dystopian world in the near future in his book The European Spring.

In Denmark, a divided society is the result of an ideological war against Islam, which seems like the beginning of the road to perdition. In the midst of the chaos a group of internationally renowned scientists and entrepreneurs decide to establish a new, segregated community on the Danish island Lolland, where they want to create a renewed and better society through combining the most appealing aspects of the old world with the latest in technology. This project results in a cross between an idyllic world with thatched houses, horse carriages, free-range animals and a sci-fi world where technology has pushed the boundaries for humans who are now able to upload their consciousness into other forms and live eternally.

The dystopian world in TES is certainly one of the main tendencies in the sci-fi genre but likewise are technology and its boundaries – and this novel combines the two. The dystopian world in TES is definitely not a completely destroyed ‘start-from-scratch’-world like the one in for example Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, but a fragmented world, which someone does decide to rebuild from scratch trough technology to create a new world. One thing that is important to notice is that the technological aspect in the novel is approached with a positive attitude. Technology is the main reason that the community on Lolland is able to live that ground-breaking life filled with yet non-existent opportunities, in contrast to literature where technology is linked with a negative undertone like Nnedi Okorafors short story Spider the Artist, where technology seems to be a threat to humans through technological manufactured robots or Ernest Clines book, Ready Player One, where technology is associated with a desperate escape from a dull life.

There often seems to be a sceptical approach to technology in the sci-fi genre, because of the fear surrounding the concern that humans will create a technology they cannot control and that they are therefore going to be controlled instead of being in control. TES however has a positive approach to technology and therefore becomes somewhat grotesque and provocative, and an interesting addition to the sci-fi genre, where the dystopian world and technology is presented in a different aspect than most sci-fi books that offer the same tendencies.

TES is unfortunately not available in English yet, but will hopefully be translated in the nearest future. For now, it’s available in Danish and is being translated into several other European languages – so keep an eye out for that.  

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The Dystopian Future and American Literature

By Ditte Plauborg Larsen

Written by American author Ernest Cline, making his debut as a novelist, Ready Player One (2011) takes the reader on a nostalgic journey backwards to the 80s, a scary jump to a dystopian future, and into the depths of computer gaming, through the eyes and VR glasses of young Wade, alias Parzival, who lives most of his life in the Virtual-Reality Game, The OASIS.

RPO shows some of modern literatures most popular tendencies. Written for an YA-audience, it’s filled with suspense, taking place in a dystopian world where an epic battle between good and evil is being fought. A young hero, rising from poor circumstances, both in the real world and the virtual one, who overcomes and outsmarts the bad guys – who, as it also happens, is hilariously oblivious much of the time.

This is a future where big cooperations has taken over the luxuries of our own world to hold the global population in a firm grip of misery, where technology is the only means of escaping the grey, dull world of dystopian America. Wade comes to represent, almost merge with the reader in his recognisable character of a young adult, and becomes someone who wishes to rise from the dust and make a difference in an increasingly depressing world. A hero, young and (as Wade becomes throughout the novel) handsome, who can take on the enemy, even though it appears an impossible struggle. This is one of the popular streaks in modern literature, mostly obvious in YA-fiction, such as Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games or J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter-series.

Another main tendency that is central to RPO is the mentioned dystopian world in which Wade lives, which might just be one of the biggest literary tendencies in the 20th and 21st century. From Jules Verne, popularly called the father of science fiction, and the first Sci-Fi novels (Journey to the Center of the Earth, The Mysterious Island), filled with technological advances, to George Orwell (1984) and Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) and their dystopian futures, emerges the ideas and fears of what our future will be like, as we face threats from both nature and our own society.

Literature is the exploration of the human mind – or so it has been said for centuries. It is an experimental practice where the author and reader can examine a number of situations in order to gain knowledge, understanding or a new perception. This is also the case in the futuristic novel, a term we generally associated with being dystopian. We are faced with several challenges: people fear the development of technology; we fear climate change; we are intrigued by and fear outer space; and we fear human nature. Most dystopian futures in literature are human-caused. In one way, it’s a depressing thought – that our demise is our own making; but on the other hand, is it a way for us to accept and acknowledge that we are a destructive race, pushing ourselves and our planet towards some unknown, disastrous future?

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The New Classics By Sarah Windeløv

It is fairly easy to compile a long list of the literature and of the authors that helped shape the literary world. A simple search on google, and you instantly have review after review, praising and naming different books as an expression of the tendencies of the past. These books are most often what we call “the classics” and are associated with knowledge and culture. By looking at books written in specific periods of time, you’re able to look into that specific period of time from a different point of view. For instance, if you read Uncle Tom’s Cabin written by Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1852, you get an insight into what being a slave meant at that time. By reading The jungle written by Upton Sinclair in 1906 you get an inkling, that the difference between the poor and the rich was a very real problem at the time. By reading fictional pieces you can get a very real idea of what living in the books’ own time was like. These books are what you might call must-reads. But what are the must reads of today? Which books will make it and become one of “the classics”? All this is very difficult to predict, but we do have some hints as to what might end up becoming “the new classics”.

Literary tendencies differ in many ways. They are geographically affected and the tendencies vary across the different genres. So there is a lot to keep track off. One genre that is rising, however, is Science-fiction. By creating a dystopian world - a world that is broken and has to start over from scratch - the authors can address a lot of frightening but still very relevant questions. What is going to happen to the human species if what we know now as society collapses? Would we be able to survive in a world that is against us, or would we succumb to nature? That, for instance, is one of the themes in Jeff VanderMeers novel Annihilation from 2014 where the world as we know it starts to bend over for nature. This could be an expression of the ever growing fear that global warming is real and is going to change our planet for good. A very heavy and present problem, wrapped neatly and easily digestible in a thrilling sci-fi novel. Themes likes this are getting more and more popular in the sci-fi genre.

A thing that has always played a big part in sci-fi is technology. Read an old classic sci-fi novel like Jules Verne’s “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea” from 1870, and you have the mentionings of technology that was not in use at the time, and therefore seemed foreign and scary. The same is happening in today’s science-fiction, but with the rapid changes in technology that occur today, a theme like this might be even more relevant than it was back in the days. The big focus in modern Sci-fi is the idea of an AI (artificial intelligence) that could possible turn on the human species and become self aware, a fear that for some is very real. The idea that humans end up creating a technology that they cannot control is written about an awful lot in sci-fi and is an expression of a modern fear.   

Modern fears like the above mentioned (with an addition of others of course) might be the big themes of 21st century literature. As the authors of the past, the temporary authors write about issues and fears that take place in the present world. It is going to be interesting to look back in 100 years time, on the literature of today and use it to get an idea of the society at this time. What did we fear? Why did we fear it? And was there probable cause for the said fear? I guess we won't and cannot know for sure, at least not yet.

The purpose of this blog is to explore new literature and to try and make a map of the different trends, that might end up defining 21st century literature.