Our 33rd graduate symposium, The Literature of the New Millennium, borrows an idea from the author and critic Italo Calvino, who in 1983 prepared a series of lectures on universal values that he saw as central to the future of literature. He called it Six Memos for the New Millennium: Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility, and Multiplicity. Sadly, Calvino passed away before completing the sixth memo, on Consistency, leaving scholars and writers to wonder about its role in his view.

In 2021, the MA students of SUNY New Paltz were asked to examine this same question: twenty years into our new millennium, what is the state of literature, and what key characteristics do we see for its future? What is ‘realism’ in the age of alternative facts? How should the growing threat of climate change be reflected in our literature? How will the canon change and grow with increasing diversity and globalization? How do artists consider questions of authenticity and cultural appropriation? How are changes in digital technology and publishing affecting the reading experience? These questions were just the beginning of our ongoing inquiry.

Our symposium speaker, author Matt Bell, is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Arizona State University, and the author of several novels including the New York Times Notable Appleseed and the popular guide to novel writing, Refuse to Be Done. As our symposium keynote speaker, he carefully reviewed the work of our students and thoughtfully responded to each paper with thoughts and questions for the students. We are pleased to be able to provide Bell’s keynote address here, with his own list of Calvinoesque values for the literature of this millennium. His vision for the future is as inclusive and generous and exciting as his own work has always been and continues to be.

Sophia Field’s paper, “Gender Under Duress: Gender De/construction in The Argonauts” examined a widely-known autobiographical work by American writer Maggie Nelson, who uses the Classical myth of Jason to explore her relationship with transgender artist Harry Dodge as well as her experiences during pregnancy. Field digs into the many layers of references within Nelson’s book, from Roland Barthes to Judith Butler, and discusses how the signifying power of language as applied to gender in the autobiography, and how this is used to locate the humor and truth inside of Nelson’s experiences.

Our next paper comes from Michael Clark, examining “Apocalypse in Cloud Atlas and Oryx and Crake: A Concurrent Death to Patriarchy and Capitalism.” In his analysis, Clark looks at two postmodern novels through alternating lenses to show how these works explore the end of a male-dominated society as it is braided through apocalyptic narrative with the collapse of consumerism and industrialization. Together these “concurrent deaths” form twin apocalyptic visions of the end to a former world order and the beginnings of something new.

There was perhaps no paper more timely than Shannon Moran’s “Queers in Quarantine: An Exploration of How Isolation Impacts Performance in Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall”. Though, ironically, this 1963 novel by Austrian writer Haushofer has fallen out of print in recent years, Moran shows us exactly why it is an exemplar of life during the COVID pandemic. In The Wall, a nameless female narrator lives in total isolation in what seems to be a dystopian future. The survival narrative explores this extreme isolation in ways that seem prescient nowadays to the life many people lived during the pandemic lockdowns. Moran’s paper explores these facets while also looking at how the novel speaks on queer identities, and the isolations that can be inherent therein.

Our 33rd symposium marked the beginning of our new MA concentration in Creative Writing by including two works of fiction by students, similarly inspired by Calvino’s memos—a first in our Symposium’s history.

First, in Brianna Castagnozzi’s short story, “Robinson,” we have another COVID exploration that calls back to the very first English language novel by Daniel Defoe. An eager undergraduate student in Catagnozzi’s story describes her experiences taking an online seminar with a Professor Robinson, whose lectures have all been pre-taped. In turns funny and poignant and surprising, this story takes the technological advances of the present and holds them in stark relief against the literature of the past, in ways that are entirely fitting to Calvino’s predictions.

Finally, in an excerpt from Moshe Siegel’s novel The Liminal, we see the ways in which the literature of this new millennium advance into new territories. In a dystopian future where humans live in protective bubbles for fear of infection by fungal spores, a young protagonist Etan, finds that he has gifts that permit him to explore beyond the boundaries of his community’s bubble and learn more about the ecological threats that they all face. The novel resonates both with the pandemic moment and the looming threats of climate change, while also tethering us to a by-now classic texture of early science fiction novels.

Taken together, the papers and creative works of our students presented a kind of update and answer to Calvino’s original memos, highlighting the key values important to our ever-evolving literature and the paths it may take into the remainder of our “new millennium” in the hands of these brilliant thinkers and writers.