CONTEMPORARY PERIOD

PREPARED BY:
GACAYAN ANGELITO B.
GARCIA CINDY D.
SILLATOC HOLY
Contemporary period(1900- present)
• Existing at the same time or of the present time
period
• Focuses on events than have an immediate relevance
or present time
• Includes the span of historical events starting from
1945
Qualities of contemporary period
1. Reality based stories with strong characters and a believable story.
2. Well-defined, realistic, highly developed characters in realistic,
sometimes harsh environment.
3. Often the stories are character driven
4. The literature is ironic and reflects currents political ,social and
personal issues.
5. May reflect a personal cynism, disillusionment and frustration.
6. Facts are questioned as are historical perspectives.
7. Often presents two contradictory arguments.
8. The literature may reflect a growing skepticism in the existence of God as
well as distrust or lack of faith in traditional institutions.
Some of the contemporary writers
1. James Baldwin wrote essays, novels, and plays on race and sexuality throughout
his life, but his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), was his most
accomplished and influential.
2. Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, a play about the effects of racism in
Chicago, was first performed in 1959.
3. Gwendolyn Brooks became, in 1950, the first African American poet to win a
Pulitzer Prize.
4. Toni Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), launched a writing career that
would put the lives of black women at its center. She received a Nobel Prize in
1993.
5.  Alice Walker began writing novels, poetry, and short stories that reflected her
involvement in the civil rights movement.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Poet Gwendolyn Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas on June 7 1917 but
moved Chicago at a very young age. She began writing and publishing
as a teenager, eventually achieving national fame for her 1945
collection A Street in Bronzeville. In 1950 Brooks becamethe first
African-American to win a Pulitzer Prize, for her book Annie Allen.
A Sunset of the City
BY GWENDOLYN BROOKS
I
Already I am no longer looked at with lechery or love.
My daughters and sons have put me away with marbles and dolls,
Are gone from the house.
My husband and lovers are pleasant or somewhat polite
And night is night.
II
It is a real chill out,
The genuine thing.
I am not deceived, I do not think it is still summer
Because sun stays and birds continue to sing.
It is summer-gone that I see, it is summer-gone.
The sweet flowers indrying and dying down,
The grasses forgetting their blaze and consenting to brown.
III
It is a real chill out. The fall crisp comes.
I am aware there is winter to heed.
There is no warm house
That is fitted with my need.
I am cold in this cold house this house
Whose washed echoes are tremulous down lost halls.
I am a woman, and dusty, standing among new affairs.
I am a woman who hurries through her prayers.
IV
Tin intimations of a quiet core to be my
Desert and my dear relief
Come: there shall be such islanding from grief,
And small communion with the master shore.
Twang they. And I incline this ear to tin,
Consult a dual dilemma. Whether to dry
In humming pallor or to leap and die.
ANALYSIS
• The first stanza is trying to point out that the mothers children had grown
up and put away or forgot what what they had once adored, including her.
• The second stanza, season has changed into autumn and the mothers
feels as if she was stucked in the spring and she feels left out.
• Next stanza, the sweet flowers and blazing grass refers to her children
changing. It states that the flowers was once sweet and the grass once
blazed but its turning brown or dying
• Last stanza is very similar to the second. Its a new season but as years
passed the mother grows extremely lonely and depressed because of the
absence of love from her children.
To sum up the poem pertains to a woman, particularly a mother who was
left alone and forgotten by her children.