Mapping Literary Shifts in Twenty-First Century Women’s Literature: A Response to the Future of the Past
Taking into account the presidential theme for MMLA, 2022--“Post-Now”--, it is important to foreground the constituency of 'now', and what its discursive urgency means for this panel. While 'now' can be ontologically considered as the transient nature of the present moment in time, which is relative in nature (Einstein 14), its association to time can also be extended to understand the persistence of circumstances and ideas as situated in the present age, or the contemporary times (Dubreuil 44). Laurent Dubreuil links literature to temporality, mentioning how “literature does not exist before but rather after itself: we reconstruct and designate it without exhausting its signification” (Dubreuil 45).