On writing a literary history of the Contemporary, or, what is, or was, 'the Contemporary' and should we keep calling it that?

Interweaving a hypothetical pragmatic project -- the writing of a literary history of the contemporary - with a critical analysis of the uses of the term 'the contemporary' and 'contemporary' in the work of a range of theorists, the article sets out to: (i) expose ambiguities in terminological usage, incl. in translation; (ii) propose a new set of terms; (iii) unpick the tricky relationship between 'the contemporary' (as concept, 'condition', impossible period, etc) and 'contemporary'; (iv) open the way to the writing of an actual literary history of the contemporary [an ongoing project]; (v) make 'the contemporary' a more useful critical term / tool.