Microperiodizing the Present

Abstract As we move further into the twenty-first century, the last decades of the twentieth century have become a special irritant. Their proximity to the present makes them both outdated and insufficiently historical. But the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s were formative for many authors writing today. This article argues for the persistence of the contemporary as a category that has always been historical and thus always after the formative decades that precede the present. Recent fiction lingers in the late twentieth century, paying attention to changing social modalities of technology: the phone calls of the 1970s, the personal computers of the 1980s, the social media of the 1990s. It suggests that even as literature remains contemporary, the time it depicts can be sliced more thinly along the lines of evolving technology. We now have microperiods, aligned with the roughly decade-long stretches where one technology arrives and ascends. This article considers recent novels as evidence of both the enduring contemporary and microperiodization, including work by Patricia Lockwood, Sally Rooney, and Vauhini Vara. It focuses on Claire Vaye Watkins’s I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness (2021) as a salient example of how these decades and their technologies are determinants of our current moment.