Shrug.
The majority of my writing is more or less literary. Sometimes there are genre elements, but they don't drive the plot; my characters drive everything. Lots of what I write are love stories, but don't conform in any way to any of the conventions of the modern definition of romance. When I write something with science fiction or fantasy elements, they tend to be in the background to the main story.
I definitely wouldn't call what I write modern realism. That's a pretty specific term as far as literary genres go. Besides which, I often use elements of magical realism and surrealism in my fiction as well, but again, these tend to take a backseat and are more a part of the tone of the story than being directly plot-related.
If I had to be pinned down, my genre would probably be hysterical realism.
I think renaming the board would ultimately be more limiting than clarifying, since there's far more to contemporary/mainstream/literary fiction than realism or modernism; e.g., postmodernism is a big part of contemporary literary fiction. Besides which, "contemporary/mainstream/literary" are the generally accepted industry terms. Getting more specific is more of an exercise done in English classrooms than a publishing house. Not that I'd be opposed to that, just sayin'.
Perhaps a sticky that more clearly defines what the board is? It's easy to discuss genre elements, since they're common to the genre. There is little common to all contemporary fiction other than a more-or-less modern setting. Even when it's not, "twenty-minutes-into-the-future" type stuff is still more or less considered contemporary.
Discussion of literary techniques like the stream-of-consciousness thread are interesting, but without a more defined purpose for the board, there's little reason such discussions couldn't go in Novels.
I'd be interested to see discussions of modern literary movements like postmodernism and hysterical realism, since though "contemporary," these can more or less be considered genres in the English classroom sense, even if not talked about that way when submitting. But such things might turn this into more of a Literary board than Mainstream/Contemporary.
I think the biggest question to answer is: What do you talk about here that would be more appropriate here than on the Novels forum?
For an example, my idea of good discussion questions like that would be, maybe, along the lines of "How do you write about ontological angst?" or "What are the burning questions of our generation?" or "What styles of writing do you think most capture the twenty-first century?" or "What is the next big literary movement?" But I could be sounding like a pompous, pretentious douche, so if discussions like this wouldn't appeal to anyone else here, feel free to ignore me.
