From “I” to “We”: The Proprioceptive Social Body in Contemporary Literature
Shreya Walia
Proprioception is a physiological term that describes a body’s “sixth sense,” which allows it to be self-aware of the orientation of individual body parts as they relate to the entire body. For example, without proprioception, driving a car would be impossible because the body would need to pay attention to the positioning of arms, legs, and eyes without understanding how they can all work together. Only through proprioception can the body maintain balance and forward movement. In a 1965 manifesto called “Proprioception,” Charles Olsen, often referred to as the father of postmodernism, uses the term to describe a reader’s relationship with poetry, when a poet pulls the reader into an objective text and evokes a full participation of all the reader’s body parts to produce a series of high-energy, transcendent experiences. Peter Siedlecki, Professor Emeritus and Poet in Residence at Daemen College, says of the proprioceptive poem: “The proprioceptive stance might be seen as excessively objective... involving the mind’s potential for establishing connections where no such connections seem to exist except within the consciousness of the I that issues its particular report of its experience” (Trawick 111). Ultimately, Olsen suggests, this technique is successful because the only way a reader can know himself is through his own experiences.
In an interesting deviation from Olsen’s use of proprioception, contemporary authors assert that communities, rather than individuals, are social proprioceptive bodies. In this view interrelated and interdependent connections exist among all members of a community, including the author, the fictional speaker, and the reader. People, in place of body parts, must work together to maintain balance and forward movement. Whereas Olsen suggests heightened self- consciousness and participation of individual parts of the body as a path towards self-knowledge, these texts seem to suggest a heightened social consciousness of people as a path towards advancement. Reworking the ideas of their postmodern heritage, contemporary authors imagine a positive future for human advancement through the realized proprioception of a social body, in which the subject as “we,” not “I,” creates forward movement through an interdependent and interconnected unification of all members, including reader and author. Many contemporary novelists, such as Ben Lerner, David Foster Wallace, Heidi Julavits, and Colson Whitehead, are participating in an extraordinary movement towards a realized collective body. During an age of pessimism, these authors hope a future will unfold itself as realized communal bodies focus on maintaining the proprioceptive balance of their present states and learn to move forward interdependently, one step at a time. Contemporary American poet and novelist, Ben Lerner focuses his second novel on ways in which the proprioceptive sense in a communal body can be dissociated and united. Lerner’s 2014 novel, 10:04, opens with the proprioceptive-less octopus that Ben Lerner (Ben Lerner being the name of the book’s author as well as the main character) encounters during a celebratory meal in Chelsea. The octopus, Lerner tells his readers, can “taste what it touches, but has poor proprioception, the brain unable to determine the position of its body in the current... it can detect local texture variations, but cannot integrate that information into a larger picture, cannot read the realistic fiction the world appears to be” (Lerner 6-7). Thus, while the octopus can taste anything it touches due to its evenly distributed neurons, it lacks an overall concept of its position in space. By comparing himself to a proprioceptive-less octopus, Lerner evokes the metaphor to comment on the poor spatial relationship individuals have with the communal body. In fact, other characters in the book are often referred to as having been “dissected”: “It felt like somebody had planned to be right back and never returned, dissected” (emphasis mine, 215); “I stared at him wide-eyed, waiting for him to die or dissect” (emphasis mine, 183); and “he was not going to stop talking at any point in the meal...unless he dissects, I thought” (emphasis mine, 117). There is a definite preoccupation with not only body parts dissecting, but also bodies themselves dissecting, suggesting a looming fear of the spatial disassociation of individual bodies from the communal body. It is interesting to note that Ben Lerner the author and Ben Lerner the speaker are both born in 1979, as part of the cynical Generation X. In comparing both himself and his Generation X friends to the proprioceptive-less octopus, Lerner criticizes the growth-from-isolation model of societal development that arose in the 1960s, around the same time as Charles Olsen published his postmodern ideas regarding individual proprioception. For Lerner, isolation, or dissection, from society is barren, narcissistic, and fundamentally unproductive.
If forward movement is achieved through collectivity, instead of isolation, then even bad forms of collectivity are considered positive. Exploring the ways in which characters from Generation X unite in the second decade of the twenty-first century, Lerner begins his novel with the 2011 tropical storm Irene. As awareness of the storm seeped into the city, it “was becoming one organism, constituting itself in relation to a threat viewable from space” (17). While navigating through New York during the storm, the narrator observes a reemergence of communication between people: “Because every conversation you overheard in line or on the street or train began to share a theme, it was soon one common conversation you could join, removing the conventional partitions from social space; riding the N train to Whole Foods in Union Square, I found myself swapping surge level predictions with a Hasidic Jew and a West Indian nurse in purple scrubs” (17). The “partitions from social space” are also barricaded as mundane objects suddenly “glow” when their interconnected relationship with humans and among humans is realized. A bag of instant coffee makes the narrator contemplate the economics behind normally mundane coffee plants, as he realizes the multitude of social relations that arise during the creation of commercially manufactured products. The looming fear of a catastrophe and the destructive methods of capitalism (such as outsourcing or transnational imperialism) are undoubtedly negative forces; however, Lerner imagines fleeting glimmers of hope in their potential to create a united organism. Later in the book, while staring at changing weather patterns, he writes, “Whenever I looked at lower Manhattan from Whitman’s side of the river I resolved to become one of the artists who momentarily made bad forms of collectivity figures of its possibility, a proprioceptive flicker in advance of the communal body” (108). Lerner’s invocation of Walt Whitman serves to address the commonality of experience, albeit negative, in uniting a social body, a theme Whitman often explores in his poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” In the midst of global pessimism towards a decaying society, Lerner insists on perceiving all forms of collectivity as positive movement. Although positive, such movement is artificial and slow.
It is curious that in a novel showcasing two disasters, only the aforementioned proves to be extraordinary. 10:04 sets itself in the years between the tropical storm Irene (2011) and the hurricane Sandy (2013), with both appearing at the beginning and the end of the novel, respectively. By the time Hurricane Sandy arrives in the narrative, the same city is now dark and lonely. When Alex and Ben ask around for help, cops “shrug dismissively,” taxi drivers “sped away,” and “here and there you could perceive a beam moving across a window, a flame, the glow of an LED, but the overall effect was of emptiness” (235-6). Yet the narrator, as he realizes “how many contradictory emotions were colliding and combining within me” (236), suppresses the urge to smile. This shift in tone is critical to understanding the book: sometime between the two disasters, the power to unite communities is transferred from an older generation represented by Ben Lerner to a younger generation represented by his child. Symbolically, herein lies the hope for Generation Y to take strides where Generation X inched forward.
In the midst of Irene, Lerner’s blood is compared to the water in the storm: “There were myriad apps to track it [Irene], the Doppler color-coded to indicate the intensity of precipitation, the same technology they’d utilized to measure the velocity of blood flow through my arteries” (17). In the midst of Hurricane Sandy, while Alex is getting a sonogram, 216 pages later, the text compares the unborn child to the storm: “On a flat-screen hung high up on the wall, we see the image of the coming storm, its limbs moving in real time, the brain visible in its translucent skull” (233). Being physically connected to his mother, Lerner’s unborn child serves as a symbol of hope for a world that is far less narcissistic than Lerner’s, a world where disaster or bad forms of collectivity are unneeded motivations for members of a community to care for each other. With this profound optimism, Lerner ends the book by addressing the “schoolchildren of America” with comforting words of wisdom: “I know it’s hard to understand / I am with you, and I know how it is” (242). Almost identically, in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” Whitman writes: “It avails not, neither time or place—distance avails not; / I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence; / I project myself—also I return—I am with you, and know how it is” (20-23) Through joint syntax and repetition, Lerner invokes Whitman, and together they serve the greater purpose of intimately uniting the past, the present, and the future, both spatially and temporally.
Towards the end of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” a synthesized whole is imagined as the dualities of light and dark, reader and writer, past and future, life and death—all momentarily become united. Similarly, Lerner injects his novel with a multiplicity of hyperpresent moments where the dubiety of time intimately pulls the reader into moments of intense collectivity. Lerner’s proprioceptive-less body affects temporal perceptions: the narrator Ben Lerner cannot decide whether he is living in the past, present, or future. In a children’s hospital wing where “a giant octopus was painted on the wall,” Lerner feels old and “simultaneously infantilized” (6). He continues to describe this feeling: “What I mean is that my parts were coming to a possess a terrible neurological autonomy not only spacial but temporal, my future collapsing in upon me as each contraction expanded, however infinitesimally, the overly flexible tubing of my heart. Including myself, I was older and younger than everyone in the room” (7). Because perceptions of past and future are distorted, the narrator is forced to live in a fluid hyperpresent; in other words, Ben Lerner lives in an intensified, multidimensional present that is constantly presented as having various navigations of possibilities. Different temporal dimensions of meaning are thus produced through one source, which in this case is Lerner’s relationship to the people in the hospital. This effect gives the reader a glance at an infinite number of moments and possibilities within Lerner’s inner consciousness, all squeezed into one hyperpresent moment. Creating the situation as both objective, such that the common everyday details let the reader insert himself into the situation, and subjective, such that the story is presented by Ben Lerner the speaker and Ben Lerner the author, allows readers to intimately empathize and sympathize with the situation. In this way Lerner connects readers with fictional characters, authors, and themselves, thereby producing an interconnected communal body in which the reader too is a participant.
Transcending the periods of modernism and postmodernism, the avant-garde elements of contemporary novels like 10:04 can be best described as postmodern elements with a modernist emphasis on authenticity in human relations. In “Post-Postmodern Discontent: Contemporary Fiction and the Social World,” American literary critic Robert L. McLaughlin identifies the root problem of postmodernism: “Postmodernism was never about self-referentiality by itself: postmodernism made the process of representation problematic, it foregrounded literature pointing to itself trying to point to the world, but it did not give up the attempt to point to the world. The sea of change, I think, is a matter of emphasis. The emphasis among young writers...is less on the self-conscious wordplay and the violation of narrative conventions and more on representing the world we all more or less share” (McLaughlin 66). Reader participation, a trait that postmodern theorist Ihab Hassan identifies as uniquely postmodern, is manipulated by Ben Lerner, David Foster Wallace, and other contemporary authors to encourage a heightened social consciousness by engaging the reader within an interconnected and interdependent communal body.
Similarly, other contemporary authors—David Foster Wallace, Heidi Julavits, and Colson Whitehead, to name a few—all imagine forward movement through a proprioceptive social body. Heidi Julavits, in her 2011 novel The Vanishers, critiques the growth-from-isolation model of societal development, using the concept of proprioception to emphasize realized interconnectedness and interdependence among multiple generations of women as a necessary means for self-growth. Likewise, David Foster Wallace believes the 1960s’ postmodern agenda is unsuccessful and incomplete. Qualities of postmodern fiction tend to stunt and paralyze the quest for meaning; instead, postmodern fiction is more concerned with absence, self- interpretation, and isolation. Although still using the metafictional and self-conscious irony present in postmodern fiction, Wallace offers a revival of sincerity and understanding that transcends his predecessors. Like Ben Lerner, he too injects himself (as the character David Wallace) into Good Old Neon and creates dialogue among members of a social body that include the author, the fictional speaker, and the reader.
On March 31, 2015, Colson Whitehead wrote a New York Times article titled “How ‘You do you’ Perfectly Captures Our Narcissistic Culture,” in which he states: “In a world where the selfie has become our dominant art form, tautological phrases like ‘You do you’ and its tribe provide a philosophical scaffolding for our ever-evolving, ever more complicated narcissism.” Applying Ben Lerner’s metaphor, Whitehead warns Generation Y of the dangers of being proprioceptive-less octopuses (like Generation X), concerned only with the narcissistic and unproductive demands of the self. For both Lerner and Whitehead, being detached and disconnected from the social body is ultimately unrewarding. Lerner writes, “The baby octopuses are delivered alive from Portugal each morning and then massaged gently but relentlessly with unrefined salt until their biological functions cease” (153). Critiquing the lazy and self-absorbed proprioceptive-less octopus, or rather, Generation X, contemporary authors assert that human beings are more than animals: an essential part of belonging to the twenty-first century community is actively belonging. The purpose of great literature is to reflect, reexamine, or reinvent the society in which it is born, and in doing so it has the potential to change the course of history. Accordingly, the purpose of contemporary fiction has become a societal awakening of the proprioceptive social body, especially a societal awakening of Generation Y—the 77 million Americans born between 1981 and 1999 who are currently in possession of America’s future. Through this agenda contemporary authors are the torchbearers of one of the most significant literary movements of the century, a movement attempting to raise active participation on the part of readers and to rekindle a flicker of hope for the future through a connected social body.
Works Cited
Hassan, Ihab Habib. The Postmodern Turn: Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1987. Print.
Lerner, Ben. 10:04: A Novel. New York: Faber and Faber, 2014. Print.
Mclaughlin, Robert L. "Post-Postmodern Discontent: Contemporary Fiction and the Social World." Symploke 12.1-2 (2004): 53-68. Web.
Olson, Charles. Proprioception. San Francisco, Ca: Four Seasons Foundation, 1965. Print. Trawick, Leonard M. World, Self, Poem: Essays on Contemporary Poetry from the "Jubliation of Poets" Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 1990. Print.
Whitehead, Colson. "How ‘You Do You’ Perfectly Captures Our Narcissistic Culture." The New York Times. The New York Times, 04 Apr. 2015. Web. 26 Apr. 2015.
Whitman, Walt. "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry." Walt Whitman: The Complete Poems. Ed. Francis Murphy. London: Penguin, 2004. 189-95. Print.
In an interesting deviation from Olsen’s use of proprioception, contemporary authors assert that communities, rather than individuals, are social proprioceptive bodies. In this view interrelated and interdependent connections exist among all members of a community, including the author, the fictional speaker, and the reader. People, in place of body parts, must work together to maintain balance and forward movement. Whereas Olsen suggests heightened self- consciousness and participation of individual parts of the body as a path towards self-knowledge, these texts seem to suggest a heightened social consciousness of people as a path towards advancement. Reworking the ideas of their postmodern heritage, contemporary authors imagine a positive future for human advancement through the realized proprioception of a social body, in which the subject as “we,” not “I,” creates forward movement through an interdependent and interconnected unification of all members, including reader and author. Many contemporary novelists, such as Ben Lerner, David Foster Wallace, Heidi Julavits, and Colson Whitehead, are participating in an extraordinary movement towards a realized collective body. During an age of pessimism, these authors hope a future will unfold itself as realized communal bodies focus on maintaining the proprioceptive balance of their present states and learn to move forward interdependently, one step at a time. Contemporary American poet and novelist, Ben Lerner focuses his second novel on ways in which the proprioceptive sense in a communal body can be dissociated and united. Lerner’s 2014 novel, 10:04, opens with the proprioceptive-less octopus that Ben Lerner (Ben Lerner being the name of the book’s author as well as the main character) encounters during a celebratory meal in Chelsea. The octopus, Lerner tells his readers, can “taste what it touches, but has poor proprioception, the brain unable to determine the position of its body in the current... it can detect local texture variations, but cannot integrate that information into a larger picture, cannot read the realistic fiction the world appears to be” (Lerner 6-7). Thus, while the octopus can taste anything it touches due to its evenly distributed neurons, it lacks an overall concept of its position in space. By comparing himself to a proprioceptive-less octopus, Lerner evokes the metaphor to comment on the poor spatial relationship individuals have with the communal body. In fact, other characters in the book are often referred to as having been “dissected”: “It felt like somebody had planned to be right back and never returned, dissected” (emphasis mine, 215); “I stared at him wide-eyed, waiting for him to die or dissect” (emphasis mine, 183); and “he was not going to stop talking at any point in the meal...unless he dissects, I thought” (emphasis mine, 117). There is a definite preoccupation with not only body parts dissecting, but also bodies themselves dissecting, suggesting a looming fear of the spatial disassociation of individual bodies from the communal body. It is interesting to note that Ben Lerner the author and Ben Lerner the speaker are both born in 1979, as part of the cynical Generation X. In comparing both himself and his Generation X friends to the proprioceptive-less octopus, Lerner criticizes the growth-from-isolation model of societal development that arose in the 1960s, around the same time as Charles Olsen published his postmodern ideas regarding individual proprioception. For Lerner, isolation, or dissection, from society is barren, narcissistic, and fundamentally unproductive.
If forward movement is achieved through collectivity, instead of isolation, then even bad forms of collectivity are considered positive. Exploring the ways in which characters from Generation X unite in the second decade of the twenty-first century, Lerner begins his novel with the 2011 tropical storm Irene. As awareness of the storm seeped into the city, it “was becoming one organism, constituting itself in relation to a threat viewable from space” (17). While navigating through New York during the storm, the narrator observes a reemergence of communication between people: “Because every conversation you overheard in line or on the street or train began to share a theme, it was soon one common conversation you could join, removing the conventional partitions from social space; riding the N train to Whole Foods in Union Square, I found myself swapping surge level predictions with a Hasidic Jew and a West Indian nurse in purple scrubs” (17). The “partitions from social space” are also barricaded as mundane objects suddenly “glow” when their interconnected relationship with humans and among humans is realized. A bag of instant coffee makes the narrator contemplate the economics behind normally mundane coffee plants, as he realizes the multitude of social relations that arise during the creation of commercially manufactured products. The looming fear of a catastrophe and the destructive methods of capitalism (such as outsourcing or transnational imperialism) are undoubtedly negative forces; however, Lerner imagines fleeting glimmers of hope in their potential to create a united organism. Later in the book, while staring at changing weather patterns, he writes, “Whenever I looked at lower Manhattan from Whitman’s side of the river I resolved to become one of the artists who momentarily made bad forms of collectivity figures of its possibility, a proprioceptive flicker in advance of the communal body” (108). Lerner’s invocation of Walt Whitman serves to address the commonality of experience, albeit negative, in uniting a social body, a theme Whitman often explores in his poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” In the midst of global pessimism towards a decaying society, Lerner insists on perceiving all forms of collectivity as positive movement. Although positive, such movement is artificial and slow.
It is curious that in a novel showcasing two disasters, only the aforementioned proves to be extraordinary. 10:04 sets itself in the years between the tropical storm Irene (2011) and the hurricane Sandy (2013), with both appearing at the beginning and the end of the novel, respectively. By the time Hurricane Sandy arrives in the narrative, the same city is now dark and lonely. When Alex and Ben ask around for help, cops “shrug dismissively,” taxi drivers “sped away,” and “here and there you could perceive a beam moving across a window, a flame, the glow of an LED, but the overall effect was of emptiness” (235-6). Yet the narrator, as he realizes “how many contradictory emotions were colliding and combining within me” (236), suppresses the urge to smile. This shift in tone is critical to understanding the book: sometime between the two disasters, the power to unite communities is transferred from an older generation represented by Ben Lerner to a younger generation represented by his child. Symbolically, herein lies the hope for Generation Y to take strides where Generation X inched forward.
In the midst of Irene, Lerner’s blood is compared to the water in the storm: “There were myriad apps to track it [Irene], the Doppler color-coded to indicate the intensity of precipitation, the same technology they’d utilized to measure the velocity of blood flow through my arteries” (17). In the midst of Hurricane Sandy, while Alex is getting a sonogram, 216 pages later, the text compares the unborn child to the storm: “On a flat-screen hung high up on the wall, we see the image of the coming storm, its limbs moving in real time, the brain visible in its translucent skull” (233). Being physically connected to his mother, Lerner’s unborn child serves as a symbol of hope for a world that is far less narcissistic than Lerner’s, a world where disaster or bad forms of collectivity are unneeded motivations for members of a community to care for each other. With this profound optimism, Lerner ends the book by addressing the “schoolchildren of America” with comforting words of wisdom: “I know it’s hard to understand / I am with you, and I know how it is” (242). Almost identically, in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” Whitman writes: “It avails not, neither time or place—distance avails not; / I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence; / I project myself—also I return—I am with you, and know how it is” (20-23) Through joint syntax and repetition, Lerner invokes Whitman, and together they serve the greater purpose of intimately uniting the past, the present, and the future, both spatially and temporally.
Towards the end of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” a synthesized whole is imagined as the dualities of light and dark, reader and writer, past and future, life and death—all momentarily become united. Similarly, Lerner injects his novel with a multiplicity of hyperpresent moments where the dubiety of time intimately pulls the reader into moments of intense collectivity. Lerner’s proprioceptive-less body affects temporal perceptions: the narrator Ben Lerner cannot decide whether he is living in the past, present, or future. In a children’s hospital wing where “a giant octopus was painted on the wall,” Lerner feels old and “simultaneously infantilized” (6). He continues to describe this feeling: “What I mean is that my parts were coming to a possess a terrible neurological autonomy not only spacial but temporal, my future collapsing in upon me as each contraction expanded, however infinitesimally, the overly flexible tubing of my heart. Including myself, I was older and younger than everyone in the room” (7). Because perceptions of past and future are distorted, the narrator is forced to live in a fluid hyperpresent; in other words, Ben Lerner lives in an intensified, multidimensional present that is constantly presented as having various navigations of possibilities. Different temporal dimensions of meaning are thus produced through one source, which in this case is Lerner’s relationship to the people in the hospital. This effect gives the reader a glance at an infinite number of moments and possibilities within Lerner’s inner consciousness, all squeezed into one hyperpresent moment. Creating the situation as both objective, such that the common everyday details let the reader insert himself into the situation, and subjective, such that the story is presented by Ben Lerner the speaker and Ben Lerner the author, allows readers to intimately empathize and sympathize with the situation. In this way Lerner connects readers with fictional characters, authors, and themselves, thereby producing an interconnected communal body in which the reader too is a participant.
Transcending the periods of modernism and postmodernism, the avant-garde elements of contemporary novels like 10:04 can be best described as postmodern elements with a modernist emphasis on authenticity in human relations. In “Post-Postmodern Discontent: Contemporary Fiction and the Social World,” American literary critic Robert L. McLaughlin identifies the root problem of postmodernism: “Postmodernism was never about self-referentiality by itself: postmodernism made the process of representation problematic, it foregrounded literature pointing to itself trying to point to the world, but it did not give up the attempt to point to the world. The sea of change, I think, is a matter of emphasis. The emphasis among young writers...is less on the self-conscious wordplay and the violation of narrative conventions and more on representing the world we all more or less share” (McLaughlin 66). Reader participation, a trait that postmodern theorist Ihab Hassan identifies as uniquely postmodern, is manipulated by Ben Lerner, David Foster Wallace, and other contemporary authors to encourage a heightened social consciousness by engaging the reader within an interconnected and interdependent communal body.
Similarly, other contemporary authors—David Foster Wallace, Heidi Julavits, and Colson Whitehead, to name a few—all imagine forward movement through a proprioceptive social body. Heidi Julavits, in her 2011 novel The Vanishers, critiques the growth-from-isolation model of societal development, using the concept of proprioception to emphasize realized interconnectedness and interdependence among multiple generations of women as a necessary means for self-growth. Likewise, David Foster Wallace believes the 1960s’ postmodern agenda is unsuccessful and incomplete. Qualities of postmodern fiction tend to stunt and paralyze the quest for meaning; instead, postmodern fiction is more concerned with absence, self- interpretation, and isolation. Although still using the metafictional and self-conscious irony present in postmodern fiction, Wallace offers a revival of sincerity and understanding that transcends his predecessors. Like Ben Lerner, he too injects himself (as the character David Wallace) into Good Old Neon and creates dialogue among members of a social body that include the author, the fictional speaker, and the reader.
On March 31, 2015, Colson Whitehead wrote a New York Times article titled “How ‘You do you’ Perfectly Captures Our Narcissistic Culture,” in which he states: “In a world where the selfie has become our dominant art form, tautological phrases like ‘You do you’ and its tribe provide a philosophical scaffolding for our ever-evolving, ever more complicated narcissism.” Applying Ben Lerner’s metaphor, Whitehead warns Generation Y of the dangers of being proprioceptive-less octopuses (like Generation X), concerned only with the narcissistic and unproductive demands of the self. For both Lerner and Whitehead, being detached and disconnected from the social body is ultimately unrewarding. Lerner writes, “The baby octopuses are delivered alive from Portugal each morning and then massaged gently but relentlessly with unrefined salt until their biological functions cease” (153). Critiquing the lazy and self-absorbed proprioceptive-less octopus, or rather, Generation X, contemporary authors assert that human beings are more than animals: an essential part of belonging to the twenty-first century community is actively belonging. The purpose of great literature is to reflect, reexamine, or reinvent the society in which it is born, and in doing so it has the potential to change the course of history. Accordingly, the purpose of contemporary fiction has become a societal awakening of the proprioceptive social body, especially a societal awakening of Generation Y—the 77 million Americans born between 1981 and 1999 who are currently in possession of America’s future. Through this agenda contemporary authors are the torchbearers of one of the most significant literary movements of the century, a movement attempting to raise active participation on the part of readers and to rekindle a flicker of hope for the future through a connected social body.
Works Cited
Hassan, Ihab Habib. The Postmodern Turn: Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1987. Print.
Lerner, Ben. 10:04: A Novel. New York: Faber and Faber, 2014. Print.
Mclaughlin, Robert L. "Post-Postmodern Discontent: Contemporary Fiction and the Social World." Symploke 12.1-2 (2004): 53-68. Web.
Olson, Charles. Proprioception. San Francisco, Ca: Four Seasons Foundation, 1965. Print. Trawick, Leonard M. World, Self, Poem: Essays on Contemporary Poetry from the "Jubliation of Poets" Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 1990. Print.
Whitehead, Colson. "How ‘You Do You’ Perfectly Captures Our Narcissistic Culture." The New York Times. The New York Times, 04 Apr. 2015. Web. 26 Apr. 2015.
Whitman, Walt. "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry." Walt Whitman: The Complete Poems. Ed. Francis Murphy. London: Penguin, 2004. 189-95. Print.