Cultural Zeitgeist

     ⋮   Audio version below

‘Zeitgeist’ is a term that has fallen out of common use and may be unfamiliar to many students – somewhat ironically because of its own definition below – but it’s a useful concept to keep in mind when thinking about common themes among literary works, their relative obscurity or popularity to the general public, and which novels or short stories best capture our current historical, political and cultural moment.

The Oxford English Dictionary provides a simple definition of the word: “the defining spirit or mood of a particular period, esp. as reflected in the prevailing ideas, beliefs, and attitudes of the time; the social or cultural trends prevalent at a particular time.” Zeitgeist is frequently discussed as an overarching idea that effects wide swaths of the population without fully understanding it. Zeitgeist ideas also bubble to the surface in different forms in roughly the same time period: in politics, arts and culture, entertainment, the sciences and other cultural outlets as well. Zeitgeist ideas are pervasive, define the era in which we live, and because we’re living in the moment and don’t yet benefit from hindsight, are difficult to define. The fervor for democracy and independence that led to the American Revolution, the conflict over slavery that culminated in the Civil War and the social and cultural upheaval in the 1960’s are all concrete examples of eras in American history where a small number of ideas dominated the cultural conversation, or “captured the zeitgeist.”

Though literature by itself might not always capture the national zeitgeist these days, Robert McCrum, in his short article, “What makes a 'zeitgeist book'?” from 2009, provides a fairly concise extension to the definition as it relates to books and literature: “Zeitgeist books often sell a lot of copies, but they aren't necessarily bestsellers. They might turn out to be classics (George Orwell's 1984, for instance) but they don't have to be (Desmond Morris's The Naked Ape). A zeitgeist book reflects the spirit of the age in which the author and their readers don't necessarily understand. Such books say something about their time, but often they survive more as curiosities than classics.” McCrum’s definition also introduces the idea of popularity and quality to the discussion. Books that capture the zeitgeist might be relatively popular, though that popularity may or may not survive into the next era, and whether that popularity aligns with high literary or artistic quality and achievement is an important issue too (for example, the Harry Potter series is immensely popular, spoke to a generation and established the crossover appeal of YA literature, but whether the series has literary merit or will be remembered in the next century is another question).

Not only is the definition of the term hard to pin down, but how it is used today is debated as well. In an article for Slate, Katy Waldman laments the misuse and overuse of the term and worries about trivializing it too: “A zeitgeist used to be a formidable thing. Matthew Arnold coined the term in 1848 to capture the spirit of social unrest that suffused Victorian England...But if we used to talk about the Roaring ’20s or the Flower Power ’60s, great sweeps of history distilled into luminescent symbols, now we get a 5-minute-long zeitgeist consisting of, say, TV shows about white girls in Brooklyn. Somehow, the zeitgeist—once so historical and grand—has become an anemic, trivial little sprite.” Waldman’s suggestion is that zeitgeist should be reserved for truly paradigm shifting ideas.

Part of the difficulty of identifying artistic examples of the current zeitgeist is how much more media is available across different types and how differently people experience it. In his New York Times article “‘Duck Dynasty’ vs. ‘Modern Family’: 50 Maps of the U.S. Cultural Divide,” Josh Katz maps which regions in America watch different TV shows. He finds that, not surprisingly, Americans watch very different shows based on where they live. Show preferences diverge along predictable cultural fault lines: urban and rural, north and south, east/west coasts and middle America, and along racial lines too. When so much of America is consuming increasingly divergent and algorithmically personalized types of media and living vastly different lives, it’s even harder to identify a singular prevailing idea that captures the national zeitgeist.

Nonetheless, critics are trying to pin down today’s cultural zeitgeist. In a book review for NPR, Maureen Corrigan, after pondering the overwhelming number of books, movies and TV shows that are female-focused dystopian science fiction, writes, “surrendering to the zeitgeist, I picked Sophie Mackintosh's acclaimed debut novel, The Water Cure, as my first read of 2019. It's a feminist dystopian fairy tale — evocative, suspenseful, and bleak — in short, everything this age seems to be demanding.” Similarly, writing for Women in the World about a slew of new books that address women’s midlife time period, the author quotes author Candance Bushnell: “It just seems like a new, zeitgeisty time when women are saying, ‘We’re not going to do our 50s the way everyone’s telling us we’re supposed to.”

So what is the cultural zeitgeist in the United States today? That’s impossible to say with any certainty, but for the sake of conversation, we’ll take a stab at it:

1. Technological advances in almost every area of life (transportation, communication, entertainment, etc.) have happened at such a rapid pace that our culture has been changed in ways that we are just now beginning to understand, and anxieties about the overuse of technology, the eroding on privacy, the increasingly tech-focused economy and the rise of predictive software and artificial intelligence are a defining worry of our time.
2. Between Black Lives Matter, the #metoo movement, GLBTQI+ equality and immigrant rights, the movement for, the reaction to and the discussion surrounding these issues have collectively become a new and current civil rights moment, and all of this is happening within the context of the intractable and unavoidable political polarization of the Obama and Trump presidencies.
3. The overwhelming research confirming climate change, rising temperatures, the melting of the polar ice caps, the recognition of the Anthropocene and the experience of witnessing the early effects of it have become a cultural (and global) issue.

Each of these issues cut across all media types. They are the subject of politics, art and literature, film and television and research by academics across disciplines, and could rightly be called part of the current zeitgeist.

So how should the concept of zeitgeist effect your reading?

1. Since we have the advantage of hindsight, as you read older works, think about the historical moment, how we now interpret the historical era, which literary works best capture the spirit of the times, and how we interpret those works today.
2. Consider the major issues and challenges of our current time period. Try to identify them and where you see them discussed: in the news, movies, TV and music, books, research, social media, among friends and family, etc.
3. Think about contemporary literature from your literature classes, what you read in your free time, what’s on display at a local bookstore, what is on bestseller lists, and what is being made into TV shows or movies. Which works are most representative of our times? Which works captured the idea first, which did it best, which is most popular, and which do you think will be remembered 50 years from now?