This module asks students to consider the question ‘What is the Contemporary?’. How can literature help us to understand our sense of ‘the now’ and locate us in the present? And what does it have to tell us about our past and our future? These enquiries take in a series of literary and critical positions on matters of ‘the present’ and ‘contemporariness’ as explored through literature and theory. Over a series of seminars, students will be required to conceptualise and understand the different ways that we can understand the idea of the contemporary, contemporaneousness as a historical term and as a term of theoretical discourse.