Douglas Coupland

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Douglas Coupland
Born December 30, 1961 (1961-12-30) (age 46)
CFB Baden-Söllingen, West Germany
Occupation Writer, Artist
Nationality Canadian
Literary movement Postmodernism, Modernism
Notable work(s) Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, Microserfs, & JPod
Influences
Official website

Douglas Coupland (born December 30, 1961) is a Canadian fiction writer, playwright, and visual artist. His first book, the 1991 novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, was nominated for the Books in Canada First Novel Award, became an international bestseller and popularized the terms "McJob" and "Generation X". Much of Coupland's work explores the unexpected cultural shifts created by the impact of new technologies on middle class North American culture. Persistent themes include the conflict between secular and religious values, difficulty in aging and taking on adult roles, ironic attitudes as a response to intense media saturation, and pop and mass culture.

Contents

[edit] Biography

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Coupland was born to Dr. Douglas Charles Thomas and C. Janet Coupland on a Royal Canadian Air Force base in Baden-Söllingen, West Germany. He was the third child of four sons. Coupland's family returned to Canada four years later, settling in West Vancouver, British Columbia, where he was raised. He lives in West Vancouver.

Coupland left Vancouver as a teenager to study physics at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec. He stayed only one year before going back to Vancouver to study art at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. Trained as a sculptor, Coupland worked and studied in Sapporo, Japan at the Hokkaido College of Art and Design and in Milan, Italy at the Instituto Europeo di Design.

From 1985–1986, Coupland attended the Japan-America Institute of Management Science in Honolulu, Hawaii and Tokyo, Japan. He graduated with honours. In late 1986, he returned to Vancouver, where he began to write on popular culture for Vancouver Magazine and Western Living magazine. In 1988, he moved to Toronto to work on a now-defunct business magazine, Vista.

Coupland is openly gay,[1] though his works only rarely address any gay themes. He describes himself as being politically unaligned, and has espoused both conservative and liberal views, criticizing the Canadian health care system and gun control while supporting multi-culturalism and social liberalism. He is a monotheist, but is not a churchgoer[2] and does not discuss denomination.

[edit] Writing career

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In 1989, Coupland severed his magazine connections and began writing fiction. His debut novel was Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (published March 11, 1991 by St. Martin's Press). It was critically praised for capturing the zeitgeist of his peer group, for whom its title provided a convenient label. Although society later estimated "Generation X" as being born up to and including the early 1970s, Coupland's range was close enough to approximate the label. Without knowing it, he had provided one of the names for his whole generation. Consequently, Coupland starred in a series of MTV promos reading excerpts from his book, participating in a form of mutual validation.

Though his next novel, Shampoo Planet (1992) had a more conventional structure than its predecessor, there were similarities, including a detailed eye for the mores and minutiae of the lives of its young protagonists (video games, hippie parents, and an obsession with consumer culture).

This novel was followed in 1994 by a collection of thematically linked short stories called Life After God.

Microserfs (1995) is centered on high-tech life in Seattle, Washington and Palo Alto, California, contrasting the corporate culture of Microsoft with pre-dot-com bubble start-up companies. The novel also reflected Coupland’s art school roots. Much of the book's page layout used bold and unusual typography and was grounded in Pop Art and Text Art, influenced by artists such as Andy Warhol and Jenny Holzer. Because of Coupland’s lack of roots in traditional literary academia, critics had a hard time locating the meaning and intent of the pages.[citation needed][original research?] A decade later, this use of typography is more commonly understood and to varying in the art and literary worlds.[original research?]1997’s Girlfriend in a Coma (its title taken from The Smiths) showed Coupland’s willingness to tackle broader themes and featured some of his most mature writing. Poet and critic Tom Paulin described his use of language as "full of extraordinary imagery" and "fresh, like wet paint". Like the earlier novels, however, some critics disapproved of its experimental structure.[citation needed]

With its adoption of supernatural elements, Girlfriend in a Coma marked a change in Coupland's work. Hitherto, his narratives were focused on conventional characters living in a carefully drawn, instantly recognizable modern world.[original research?] The plots of Girlfriend in a Coma and his subsequent novels have all introduced either supernatural occurrences or involve "low probability events", such as air disasters or meteorite impacts. This change has moved Coupland away from his earlier generation-defining work and allowed him to develop and explore new and darker themes.[original research?]

While his books are rich in humour, observation, and carefully drawn vignettes, some of Coupland's early critics noted a tendency for the plot development to be lost amongst these elements.[citation needed] The apocalyptic ending of Girlfriend in a Coma, for example, was seen by some[who?] to be forced and out of step with the rest of the book. The United Kingdom’s The Independent called the book "a brilliantly constructed set piece." In the same context, Miss Wyoming (1999), his next work of fiction, was considered by some[who?] to be a more rounded and satisfying,[original research?] even though Coupland himself considers it as a light comic novel.[citation needed]

In Japan in 2001, Coupland published God Hates Japan, a Japanese language novel done in collaboration with Vancouver computer animator Michael Howatson. The novel describes psychic malaise in Tokyo after the collapse of the 1980s economic bubble. That same year, Coupland also published All Families Are Psychotic, a comic novel exploring familial disintegration using the urban Florida landscape as a metaphor for human relationships.[original research?]

In 2002 Coupland collaborated with French conceptual art maker Pierre Huyghe on School Spirit, a book that explored ominous and unexpected events in high school environments. At the time Coupland was writing Hey Nostradamus!, a novel that was published in 2003. This was a dark story that explored the transmission of religious and secular beliefs from one generation to the next. It used the backdrop of a high school shooting massacre similar to that of the April 1999 Columbine High School massacre in Colorado.[original research?] As with all of Coupland’s novels, it was distinctly different from the novel preceding it.[original research?] The book was well-received[who?] and also shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and won the Canadian Authors' Association Award for Fiction.

In 2004, Coupland published Eleanor Rigby, a novel about human loneliness, whose title was taken from the 1966 Beatles song of the same name. The Los Angeles Times called it "moving and bittersweet."

In 2006 Coupland published JPod, which he described as a sequel "in spirit" to 1995’s Microserfs. JPod explores the lives of tech workers in a Vancouver computer game company, which appears to be loosely based on Electronic Arts.[citation needed][original research?] Drawing from elements of black comedy,[original research?] the story depicts life inside an amoral culture bombarded with too much information from sources such as the Internet. The book also explores Pop Art and text art typography themes Coupland explored in Microserfs.

In 2006, a television pilot based on the first two chapters of JPod was commissioned by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). Written by Coupland, the film completed principal photography in early 2007. A series of thirteen episodes was announced in July 2007 for broadcast in 2008 on the CBC network.

In 2007, The Gum Thief (whose title would seem to be inspired by the 1948 Italian neorealist film The Bicycle Thief) was published in hardcover; the main characters of the novel all steal and/or chem gum at one point or another and gum is a key element in a novel within the novel which is called Glove Pond. The Gum Thief is written as a series of letters and novel excerpts from Glove Pond and is set largely within a Staples office superstore.

Coupland’s literary influences are largely post-World War II novelists such as Margaret Drabble, Truman Capote, Kurt Vonnegut, Joan Didion, and the writings of Andy Warhol.[citation needed] He writes in the genre of transgressional fiction.

In 2001, Coupland stopped writing for magazines and concentrated more on his visual art. His work is a continuation of the Pop Art sensibility, often blurring the distinction between art and design.[original research?] In 2005, he began to explore the relationship between literary and visual arts cultures.[original research?] Using text and lyrics from such pop culture sources as R.E.M., The Smiths, Chuck Palahniuk, and Bret Easton Ellis, Coupland’s work explores the infinite number of ways in which a single sentence or lyric can be interpreted.[original research?] Coupland also did a series of works in which he chewed up copies of his own books and wove them into hornets nests, an apparent metaphor of the breaking of the link between modernism and nature.

In 2004, Coupland wrote and performed a play, September 10, for England’s Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-on-Avon. 2006 marks the release of Everything’s Gone Green, a film based on an original screenplay by Coupland.

In 2005 Coupland published Terry, a book on Canadian Terry Fox. Fox was a humanitarian, athlete, and cancer treatment activist famous for his 1980 Marathon of hope in which he ran two-thirds of the way across Canada on one leg (the equivalent of one marathon every day for 143 days).

In 2006 a feature length documentary, Souvenir of Canada, based on Coupland’s two eponymous non-fiction works was released.

Sofia Coppola's company was incorrectly reported to have acquired the film rights to Generation X in 2001.[3] This was later discounted on Coupland's own website, which stated that Coppola's company had never been connected to a film adaptation of that book.

In June 2007, Coupland was elected into the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.[4]

In October 2007, Coupland announced he would no longer give any public readings or talk on stage about his work.[5].

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Fiction

[edit] Non-fiction

[edit] Drama and screenplays

  • Douglas Coupland: Close Personal Friend (1996)
  • September 10 (2004)
  • Inside the Light (2005)
  • Souvenir of Canada (2005) (writing and narration)
  • Everything's Gone Green (2007)
  • All Families Are Psychotic (2009)
Announced on 9 February 2006, based on the novel of the same name. It is currently in pre-production.
  • JPod (2008) (TV series)
Premiered January 8, 2007 on CBC. Canceled on March 7, 2007.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ Duralde, Alonso, "All the lonely people". The Advocate, February 1, 2005.
  2. ^ Draper, Brian, "Engaging in Reflection", Third Way magazine, March 11, 1997.
  3. ^ Gill, Alexandra. "Filming 'that Coupland world'". The Globe and Mail. July 2, 2005.
  4. ^ http://www.rca-arc.ca/en/news/news_items/newmembers_awards07.htm
  5. ^ Sci-Fi-London's webTV service - Coupland declares his last public reading. "[1]"

[edit] External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
Persondata
NAME Coupland, Douglas
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION American novelist, short story writer, playwright, and graphic designer
DATE OF BIRTH December 30, 1961 (1961-12-30) (age 46)
PLACE OF BIRTH Baden-Söllingen, Germany
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH