Contemporary (1975 – present)
Fifty years of globalization, neoliberalism, the digital turn, the end of the Cold War, and the slow realization that the modernist promise has run out.
What Defined It
The postmodern condition (Lyotard, 1979): an “incredulity toward grand narratives.” The big Enlightenment stories — progress, reason, emancipation — lose their grip. In literature, Pynchon, DeLillo, Rushdie, Bolaño, Sebald, Knausgård; in American fiction a turn toward the autobiographical, the fragmented, the ironic. McCarthy writes Gothic westerns that feel like Old Testament prophecy. Houellebecq writes a France that has stopped believing in itself.
In cinema the auteurs consolidate. Late Scorsese keeps making films about guilt, violence, and grace — Goodfellas, Casino, The Departed, Silence, The Irishman. Lynch builds a surrealist American unconscious — Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire. Kubrick closes with Eyes Wide Shut. A generation of international auteurs (Haneke, Kiarostami, Kieślowski, Wong Kar-wai, Tarr, Reygadas) pushes slow cinema into a serious global movement.
Meanwhile: the personal computer, the internet, social media, climate change, and — by the 2020s — generative AI. The cultural center of gravity shifts from print to screen to phone.
Key Figures
- Literature: Pynchon, DeLillo, McCarthy, Morrison, Rushdie, Sebald, Bolaño, Knausgård, Houellebecq, Coetzee, Saramago, Murakami, Ferrante
- Philosophy/theory: Derrida (late), Foucault (late), Habermas, Sloterdijk, Agamben, Butler, Žižek
- Cinema: Lynch, late Scorsese, Haneke, Kiarostami, the Coen brothers, PTA, Malick, Tarr
Why It Matters
We are still inside this era, which makes it hard to see clearly. What’s obvious: the 20th century’s faith in avant-gardes is gone, replaced by pastiche, meta, and re-mixing. The political imagination narrowed, then in the 2010s widened chaotically. The category “human” itself is up for grabs again — from the posthuman end (AI, biotech) and from the ecological end (Anthropocene).
Connections
- Lynch — the American unconscious, surrealism, late-century dread
- Scorsese — late films as moral summation
Lineage
- Predecessors: Post-War era; structuralism and post-structuralism
- Successors: open. The AI turn of the 2020s may mark the end of the contemporary era proper