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Contemporary Literature 1 Introduction 375 Views
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Description:
Welcome to Contemporary Literature. It's not old and banal like all that ancient literature. It's hip and cool. It wears Warby Parker glasses.
Transcript
- 00:09
contemporary literature to mean a lot of things but for our purposes we're going [Woman discussing contemporary literature]
- 00:15
to talk about literature written from about 1940 to the present so we're
- 00:20
talking about 75 years and calling it contemporary and their arguments that
- 00:26
you could make against that but the reason that that period more or less
- 00:29
works is that you're talking about life from World War two to the present a lot [Sheet ripped from book]
Full Transcript
- 00:35
of historians make the argument that American life changed after World War
- 00:40
two for all sorts of reasons you had different types of people entering the [Woman stood in front of women empowerment posters]
- 00:45
workforce because American men were overseas fighting and then when
- 00:50
Americans came back and had been triumphant in this war and they were a
- 00:54
global superpower what they did was they started having lots and lots of babies [Babies appear in hospital cots]
- 00:59
all of a sudden which meant a huge population expansion in what we call the
- 01:03
baby boom there's also just the continuing industrialization of America [Graph of births and baby appears]
- 01:10
the rise of civil rights and new opportunities for all sorts of different
- 01:15
people continued immigration into the United States new technology new social
- 01:22
norms so basically everything changes in this period and the argument is that if
- 01:27
you look from about 1940 to the present you're dealing with a different a new [1940 to present timeline appears]
- 01:32
way of looking at the world and some people actually would date the
- 01:36
contemporary to say 1989 when the berlin wall Falls or 1999 at the [People climbing Berlin wall]
- 01:43
end of the millennium or two thousand one with the September 11th attacks on
- 01:49
the United States or the mid 2000s with the global financial crisis so there are [Man screaming in global crisis]
- 01:56
actually lots and lots of periods that have arguably changed global history in
- 02:01
really dramatic ways I don't think the next major event has to be a war it
- 02:05
could very likely be like a major economic event but it definitely will [Alien spacecraft hovering over city]
- 02:09
have to be something that changes life around the world as we know it
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