Trends and Challenges in Modern Literature

The world is changing at accelerated pace. It becomes more and more like a giant stage with numerous postmodern screenplays flashing tremendously before our eyes.

You do not share this view? This is just a short reminder of the recent news:

Geneva, 10 September 2008. The first beam in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN was successfully steered around the full 27 kilometers of the world's most powerful particle accelerator at 10h28 this morning.

A European court says the idea a new supercollider project could create a "celestial vacuum" (nice name for the black hole) and eventually consume the Earth is worth discussing, but the project can move forward on schedule anyway.

We wake up each morning to a cheep 70's SF movie. Just a mirror reflections of the "state of the art" in human evolution. You have to admit it. We split the atom, the center of everything, and in so doing we created chaos.

The Contemporary Poets reflect this chaos. Postmodern literature does the same thing. Pick out the fragments. Out of the chaos, the modernists and the postmodernists pull fragments of life around them. They then leave it to the reader to put these fragments back together.

Does African-American Literature Exist?

The question of what makes a piece of writing African American literature or not is one that I have never been confronted with before. I have certainly never been challenged to question the entire existence of the genre before taking a course entitled "ENGL 234: Major Writers in African American Literature". On the contrary, frequent evenings spent perusing bookstores have fortified the notion in my mind that the genre is alive and well. Other literature courses have not touched on this subject at all much less brought this question to light. Through that course, however, I found that it is certainly one worth exploring and one that deserves a definitive answer. I have come to understand the genre of African American literature as encompassing any piece of literature that deals specifically with issues unique to African Americans as a culture.

It is interesting to consider the definition for this genre that our English 234 class came up with at the start of this course. We all seemed to have a general understanding of what it was that we could agree upon. Students said based on what they had read in the past, that the genre was made up of books that seemed more 'real' than other books; that there was less fiction in black literature. It was also said that these books had to do with mostly issues surrounding slavery. It did not even seem to be a question that the authors of these books would be African American themselves, that appeared to be a given. It is funny that we were all so convinced that we knew what this genre was at the beginning of the course and how student's definitions have since completely changed, well mine has at least.

It is surprising to me, upon consideration, that I would agree with the claim that African American literature seemed more 'real' than books from other genres. It seems very ignorant to assume that all authors of African American literature actually had all of the life experiences they write about actually happen to them. In fact, most piece of this type of literature are fictional. Though some authors may have drawn from actual historical accounts, many of the stories themselves come from the writer's imagination. It is still safe to say that African American literature is more real than fantasy. The parameters of my definition steer it away from fantasy and more towards real, human experiences.

Modern Classical Music

Classical music in strict terms is music that was written and composed during a very specific time period. This time period is 1750 to 1820. What is it that sets this particular period apart from the Baroque period which comes right before or the Romantic which is the period right after? These are not just random dates that some forgotten historian chose, but rather refer to the actual way that the music was composed.

In literature, there are a number of recognized styles of writing. A limerick or a Haiku are both poems, and yet each one has a very strict format and layout. This same principle applies to music. Pieces written during the classical period have a very distinct structure and layout as well. A person who has classical music training can recognize the differences between pieces in the same way that a person schooled in literature can tell you the exact difference between an English sonnet and an Italian one.

So what happens when you have a piece of music that follows this exact format, but was written during a later period? Do you call it a piece of classical music, or maybe, a modern classical piece?

One of the latest trends in the world of video gaming is to have background music that is written in the classical style. These are not simple tunes, these are pieces that are written to be preformed and played by an entire orchestra. The people who are composing the music are those that have been educated in the field of music and are following the format of the classic composition. The creators of these pieces are not only wonderful writers, they are often musicians themselves.