Contemporary Drift: Genre, Historicism, and the Problem of the Present by Theodore Martin

Abstract

Reviewed by: Contemporary Drift: Genre, Historicism, and the Problem of the Present by Theodore Martin Joseph Darda Theodore Martin. Contemporary Drift: Genre, Historicism, and the Problem of the Present. Columbia UP, 2017. 264 pp. In 1955, the Modern Fiction Club at Purdue University founded Modern Fiction Studies to advance scholarship on modern and contemporary fiction. The founding editors sought the latest thinking on literary modernism—the first volume included essays on William Faulkner, D. H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf—but they left the door open to the emerging field of contemporary literature. With New Criticism ascendant, the editors published work by formalists committed to the intrinsic features of the text, but they faced the extrinsic historical challenge of distinguishing the modern from the contemporary, of historicizing the present. From day one, the field of contemporary literature has been animated by that tension between form and history, text and context. When and what is the contemporary? Can we know it as history? What do we talk about when we talk about the contemporary? Theodore Martin's important new book Contemporary Drift: Genre, Historicism, and the Problem of the Present identifies how the meaning of the contemporary has been obscured by the rift between formalists and historicists, from the New Criticism of the 1940s to the New Historicism of the 1980s and ever since. That is because the history of the contemporary, Martin argues, surfaces in the changes and continuities of generic form. The contemporary drifts, but it also drags. Today's contemporary is different from yesterday's, but they are not wholly unrelated. Genre provides a critical apparatus for measuring the distance from yesterday to today, for identifying the unique characteristics of our contemporary but also what binds it to the past. Martin suggests that the drag of genre—what remains stable about, for example, the novel of manners or the noir film—allows us to control for the drift of the contemporary. Formulating a theory of genre is a first step toward writing a history of the present. "Genre's blend of change and continuity, of drift and drag, makes it a privileged site for exploring the process of becoming contemporary," he writes (13): "Think of it as a controlled experiment in historical emergence." The larger ambition of Martin's experiment is to reconcile history with form by writing the former through the latter. Martin is by no means the first to confront the problem of the contemporary. His study traces and synthesizes carefully observed critical genealogies of contemporary literary history and literary genre theory to conceptualize the historical present. Contemporary literary studies has long struggled with whether and how it fits into the [End Page 385] historicist paradigm that has dominated English departments since Stephen Greenblatt declared a desire to speak to the dead thirty years ago. The Post-45 collective, a group of midcareer scholars broadly interested in the institutions and sociology of writing and reading, has taken the lead in bringing historicism to bear on contemporary literary culture. But the group has, for the most part, set aside the theoretical question of what constitutes contemporary literature to get down to the business of rewriting postwar literary history. While the Post-45 collective has delivered revisionist histories of institutional creative writing, the Democratic Party, the suburbs, and the free market, it has worked around the edges of the contemporary as a critical concept. Martin looks to genre to offer a theory of the contemporary and a history of our contemporary. The status of genre fiction has changed in the twenty-first century, he observes, with literary novelists and indie filmmakers turning to genre fiction to take a measure of the present as it relates to and departs from the past. Genre is having a moment in English departments, too. Literary scholars have increasingly recognized genre as a useful indicator of how literature registers and even anticipates historical change. Martin's key insight is that this treatment of genre as a historical tool, when applied to the contemporary, can turn the present into an object of historical analysis. Contemporary Drift bridges the conversations being had by the Post-45 collective and the new genre theorists by reframing the problem...