Contemporary American Literature — what is it and what's changing?
Pinned
What this course is
Five books you'll buy at the bookstore, and a handful of things you can only read on a screen for free. We're going to treat all of them as literature, and then we're going to ask what they tell us about how the world of literature might be changing.
Throughout the semester, we'll read a range of recent American literature and consider questions like: What are people reading? What is literature? Who decides that? And what shifts might be happening in the literary landscape? You'll read an award-winning novel made popular by BookTok, short stories published in literary magazines, a humorous and poignant graphic novel, a fanfiction short story, and even interactive storytelling on Reddit.
Every one of those routes runs through gatekeepers: editors, publishing companies, prize juries, librarians, algorithms, moderators, a tagging system, a comment section. The question we keep coming back to isn't which of these is good. It's what people are reading in the 21st century, what gets counted as literature, and what each of those systems lets through, keeps out, and rewards.
#start-here#what-is-literature#fall-2026
That question isn't settled — and in this class we're keeping it unsettled on purpose.
the whole syllabus, basically
The reading list
Five of the semester's texts. Every one gets the same fields, in the same order, whatever it is and wherever it came from.
Twelve speculative, satirical stories about race and consumption in America — among them a theme park where paying customers act out racial violence, and a Black Friday sale that not every shopper survives.
02
The Song of Achilles
Novel · retelling
Madeline Miller
Year
2012
Comes to you via
Ecco — Orange Prize, then a decade later, BookTok
Gatekeeper
A prize jury, then an algorithm
The Iliad told from Patroclus's point of view — an exiled prince's lifelong love for Achilles, from their boyhood together to the war that kills them both.
03
My dead girlfriend keeps messaging me on Facebook
Serialized horror
u/natesw
Year
2011
Comes to you via
r/nosleep — no editor, no advance, posted in parts
Gatekeeper
Upvotes and a moderator
A man's girlfriend dies, and her Facebook account keeps messaging him — ordinary chatter at first, then things only she could have known. Posted in parts over several weeks.
04
Lunch and Other Obscenities
Fanfiction
Rheanna
Year
2009
Comes to you via
Posted free to the author's own site and LiveJournal
Gatekeeper
Tags, recs, kudos, word of mouth
Uhura's first days at Starfleet Academy and the Orion roommate who has entirely different ideas about food, privacy, and sex. The author's own summary: "Nyota liked her roommate just fine until she met her."
05
Fun Home
Graphic memoir
Alison Bechdel
Year
2006
Comes to you via
Mariner — prizes, a Tony-winning musical, repeated challenges
Gatekeeper
A school board
Bechdel's memoir about her closeted father — a small-town funeral director and English teacher — who died weeks after she came out in college, told through the books they both read.
How we'll read
Week eight you get three critical lenses, and for the rest of the semester you pick one and use it. Three is the point: choosing becomes a decision instead of a default.
I
Close reading
Meaning lives in the text. You were already doing this in high school; it just had a name.
II
Reader response
Meaning lives in the reader. BookTok is reader response at industrial scale; the nosleep comments are readers completing the text.
III
New historicism
Meaning lives in the world. What surrounds the text, who published it, what it was answering.
If you leave with a firmer definition of literature than you walked in with, something has gone wrong. The goal is a better argument, held more carefully, with more behind it.