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Name: GISELLE C. MELENDRES

Program and Section: BSED-English 3rd Year| Block 1
Course Subject: EL116- Contemporary, Popular and Emergent Literature
Instructor: Dr. Vivien Grace Jubahib
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A. What are the issues and challenges of contemporary literature?
Literature is responsive to the world around us. Fiction, poetry and plays don’t
merely ‘reflect’ reality but are instrumental in framing our understanding of events,
peoples and places. In times of transformation – rapid change or crisis, the
arrival of new social movements, revolutionary technologies – literature
articulates and interprets their impact. Writing across genres and media
engages with what is happening and generates new forms of understanding;
literature itself is transformative.
Here are some of the few issues and challenges that were evident in the
contemporary literature:
1. "Convergence culture" obliterating former distinctions between media; books
becoming one minor aspect of huge tweet, blog, comics, games, soundtrack,
television, cinema, ancillary-merchandise pro-fan franchises.
2. Scholars steeped within the disciplines becoming cross-linked jack-of-all-
trades virtual intelligentsia.
3. Core demographic for printed media is aging faster than the general
population. Failure of print and newspapers is disentrancing young apprentice
writers.
4. Literature is language-based and national; contemporary society is globalizing
and polyglot.
5. Intellectual property systems failing.
6. Digital public-domain transforms traditional literary heritage into a huge, cost-
free, portable, searchable database, radically transforming the reader's
relationship to belle-letters.
7. Contemporary literature not confronting issues of general urgency; dominant
best-sellers are in former niche genres such as fantasies, romances and teen
books.
8. Barriers to publication entry have crashed, enabling huge torrent of sub
literary and/or nonliterary textual expression.
9. Academic education system suffering severe bubble-inflation.
10. Vernacular means of everyday communication – cellphones, social networks,
streaming video – are moving into areas where printed text cannot follow.
Reference: https://www.wired.com/2009/05/eighteen-challenges-in-contemporary-
literature/

What do authors/or writers do in order to face these issues and challenges?

Writing, publishing, selling and reading of books are activities that are
intricately connected to socio-politico-economic conditions and perspectives. In our
social world, nothing happens ‘naturally’, by chance or without reasons. So, the
popularity of any book or author has distinct reasons and an attempt to unravel them
may shed light on a ‘meta-mind’ that lets things take this or that course. It is not easy
to conceive this meta-mind as it doesn’t exist in isolation, rather is permeated across
the social-literary-commercial-historical-ideological phenomena like the grammar of a
language. Popularity or unpopularity, to be in central place or relegated to margin are
occurrences that stem from grammar of a society.
Literature is exclusive; contemporary society is inclusive. But technology is
good at both breaking down doors and at building new rooms. The aims of
technology and literature are one and the same: keeping the human animal curious
enough to continue striving for the many frontiers of being. Writers and authors
should catch more the interest of their niche, and must creatively innovate ideas that
would to address the certain concerns arising in the contemporary literature. For
example, writers and publishers need a new product, and” eBooks" aren't good
enough. Writers may no longer be able to protect their work from piracy, but that
doesn't mean there aren't ways to add value to writing once again by adopting
publishing methods that actively resist duplication.
Overall, literature has proven to be one of the best ways to understand and
combat the difficult social issues, or problems that affect certain groups of people in
negative ways, that shape our world. But there are also lots of issues that
contemporary literature primarily faces so hopefully these issues can be solved to
attain a more productive state of contemporary literature across the globe.