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| Society for Contemporary Literature | |
|---|---|
| Name | Society for Contemporary Literature |
| Founded | 20th century |
| Headquarters | International |
| Focus | Contemporary literature, literary criticism, translation |
| Language | Multiple |
Society for Contemporary Literature is an international organization devoted to the study, promotion, and preservation of modern and contemporary literary production. The society fosters scholarship on living and recent authors, encourages translation and cross-cultural exchange, and convenes conferences, publishes journals, and awards prizes. It connects scholars, writers, translators, publishers, and institutions across regions including Europe, North America, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Oceania.
The society traces roots to early 20th‑century salons and periodicals associated with figures such as T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka and Gertrude Stein, evolving alongside organizations like the Modern Language Association and the Royal Society of Literature. Postwar expansion intersected with movements around Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Bertolt Brecht, Pablo Neruda and Federico García Lorca, and with institutional developments including the Library of Congress, British Council, Institut Français and Goethe-Institut. During the Cold War the society engaged with émigré networks linked to Isaac Bashevis Singer, Vladimir Nabokov, Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak, while in the late 20th century it responded to postcolonial debates involving Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Edward Said and Homi K. Bhabha. More recent decades saw collaboration with festivals and bodies such as the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Frankfurt Book Fair, Prague Writers' Festival, PEN International and Hay Festival.
The society promotes contemporary writing and criticism by supporting projects related to authors like Margaret Atwood, Gabriel García Márquez, Haruki Murakami, Alice Munro, Orhan Pamuk and Doris Lessing; facilitating translation of works by Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Clarice Lispector, Mo Yan, Arundhati Roy and Elena Ferrante; and engaging with cultural institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate Modern, Smithsonian Institution, National Endowment for the Arts and UNESCO. It promotes comparative study referencing theorists and critics like Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Michèle Le Doeuff, Pierre Bourdieu and Fredric Jameson, and collaborates with university departments including Harvard University, University of Oxford, Sorbonne University, Columbia University, University of Tokyo and University of Cape Town.
Membership has included academic scholars, independent writers, translators and publishers from houses such as Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Faber and Faber, Gallimard, Suhrkamp Verlag, Editora Abril and Shueisha. The society’s governance models echo trustee boards and advisory councils similar to those of Royal Society, Academy of American Poets, Royal Society of Literature, American Academy of Arts and Letters and Canadian Writers’ Trust. Regional chapters exist akin to networks in New York City, London, Paris, Berlin, Madrid, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Beijing, Seoul, Mumbai, Nairobi and Sydney.
The society publishes journals, proceedings and monographs that engage with authors and works by William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Kurt Vonnegut, Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney, W. B. Yeats, Pablo Neruda, Rainer Maria Rilke, Anna Seghers, Kenzaburō Ōe, Derek Walcott, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Zadie Smith, Kazuo Ishiguro, Milan Kundera, Isabel Allende, Ryszard Kapuściński, V. S. Naipaul, Octavio Paz, Czesław Miłosz, Naguib Mahfouz, Orhan Pamuk, Elie Wiesel, Marjane Satrapi, Imre Kertész, Svetlana Alexievich, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Günter Grass, John Ashbery, Jhumpa Lahiri, Yoko Ogawa and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. It issues themed special issues focused on translation, comparative poetics and contemporary narrative strategies, and partners with editorial teams at journals like The Paris Review, Granta, The New Yorker, London Review of Books, Critical Inquiry, New Literary History, PMLA, Journal of Modern Literature, Modern Fiction Studies and Comparative Literature.
Annual and biennial conferences convene panels addressing figures such as Marcel Proust, Giacomo Leopardi, Rumi, Sappho, Homer, Dante Alighieri and William Shakespeare alongside contemporary authors like Don DeLillo, Paul Auster, Chelsea Manning (literary events), Jennifer Egan, Ocean Vuong, Samantha Power (as speaker), Salman Rushdie and Margaret Atwood. The society administers prizes and fellowships modeled after awards such as the Nobel Prize in Literature, Pulitzer Prize, Man Booker Prize, Prix Goncourt, Neustadt International Prize for Literature and National Book Award, and runs workshops, translation residencies and public readings at venues like Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center and Royal Albert Hall.
Scholars trace the society’s influence through citation networks that include Harold Bloom, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Bell Hooks, C. L. R. James, Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton. Critics have debated its role vis‑à‑vis canon formation involving authors such as Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Charles Baudelaire, Gustave Flaubert, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Anton Chekhov and broader controversies exemplified by events like the Sokal affair and the Rushdie affair. Discussions about diversity, representation and decolonization compare the society’s practices with initiatives at #Black Lives Matter (movement), #MeToo, Open Society Foundations, Ford Foundation and academic reforms at institutions such as University of California, Berkeley, Goldsmiths, University of London and Yale University.
Leaders and notable affiliates have included distinguished writers, critics and translators such as T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Edward Said, Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, Chinua Achebe, Orhan Pamuk, Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney, Elena Ferrante (pen name), Alice Munro, Haruki Murakami, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, J. M. Coetzee, Ben Okri, Amin Maalouf, Carlos Fuentes, Julia Kristeva, Homi K. Bhabha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Amartya Sen (as commentator), Noam Chomsky (as public intellectual), Peter Brooks, Frank Kermode, Helen Vendler, Mary Beard, Simon Schama, Orhan Pamuk, A. S. Byatt, Jeanette Winterson, Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith, Jhumpa Lahiri, Michael Hofmann (translator), Gregory Rabassa (translator), Edith Grossman (translator), Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Philip Roth and Joseph Brodsky.
Category:Literary societies