The Concerns of Literature

1. The great task of literature is to explore what makes us human.

2. Literature speaks to the same place in the human heart and soul that religion and philosphy address; it asks and explores the same questions.  Literature speaks to the same mysteries that are the substance of art and music; to the same ordering of story and fact that history and the humanities chart and detail; to the same puzzles of mind and behavior that obsess psychology and medicine; and to the same clutter of human experience, both noble and sordid, that encompasses the human enterprise.

3. Contemporary writers speak to the large concern of our time, none of which are new in themselves. 

Because we live in times when unthinkable things happen, both mass murders and murderous governments, contemporary literature is seen as the literature of witness.

Because we live in times of great movements of people, in an age of the displaced, of the immigrant, of human trafficing, or the refugee -- because of these shiftings of peoples, contemporary literature is the literature of exile.

Because the unthinkable and displacement are the working out of "cosmic" or spiritual forces, contemporary literature is often preoccupied with the presence or the probability of evil, both as evil is embodied and as it struggles with the good.

Because old certainties are eroding or gone, contemporary literature often chooses to inhabit the grey spectrum between reality and "other" constructions of reality. Parallel to this spectrum is the scale between the rational and the irrational.

Because displacement and exile are seen as both personal and corporate, contemporary literature is often concerned with questions of identity.

4. To get at the new realities suggested here, contemporary writers often experiment with form.  This is in keeping with our cultural understanding that we live in a post-modern world. We disrupt narratives.  We shift narrative voices.  We jump story lines and scramble chronologies at will . We blur line. Every work, in this view, is by definition an experiment.