Contemporary Drift

Can a present moment ever be described as it happens? Theodore Martin takes up this question by treating "the contemporary" as more than a span of recent years. He sees it as a problem of knowledge: how people come to grasp the times they live in and how they build a common account of them. The book argues that contemporary genre fiction helps address this problem, and it pairs close theoretical discussion with a historical survey of recent literature and film.

Martin examines how present-day novels and movies portray a world shaped by global capitalism, deindustrialization and a changing climate. Along the way he offers fresh histories of the novel of manners, film noir, the Western, detective fiction and the postapocalyptic novel. The writers and filmmakers he discusses include Zadie Smith, Colson Whitehead, Vikram Chandra, China Miéville, Kelly Reichardt and the Coen brothers, whose work he shows returning again and again to the question of what the present is.

His central claim is that genre gives these artists a way to shape both the content and the concept of the contemporary. Because genre fiction mixes familiar forms with new material, it reveals how we sort the present into what feels current and what belongs to the past.