Experimental literature

Experimental literature refers to written works - often novels or magazines - that place great emphasis on innovations regarding technique and style.

Early history

The first text generally cited in this category is Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759). This text breaks many standards that would later be deliberately subverted for the advancement of fiction.

However, Tristram Shandy fails to follow conventional approaches to life story narratives: its first half spent trying to have the titular hero be born, and on utterly irrelevant digressions about the narrator's father, his Uncle Toby, and anybody else within range of the narrative. Suddenly the narrative leaps forward by decades, and the narrator is seen near the end of his life, riding a coach at breakneck speed across France, trying to escape Death.

In its approach to narrative, and its willingness to use such graphic elements as an all-black page to mourn the death of a character, Sterne's novel is a considered a fundamental text for many post-World War II authors. However, Sterne's works were not without detractors even then, as Samuel Johnson is quoted in Boswell as saying "The merely odd does not last. Tristram Shandy did not last." Denis Diderot's Jacques the Fatalist and His Master, drew many elements from Tristam Shandy, a fact not concealed in the text, making it an early example of metafiction.

20th-century history

In the 1910s, artistic experimentation became a prominent force, and various European and American writers began experimenting with the given forms. Tendencies that formed during this period later became parts of the modernist movement.^{[citation needed]} The Cantos of Ezra Pound, the post-WWI work of T. S. Eliot, prose and plays by Gertrude Stein, were some of the most influential works of the time, though James Joyce's Ulysses is generally considered the most important work of the time. The novel ultimately influenced not only more experimental writers, such as Virginia Woolf and John Dos Passos, but also less experimental writers, such as Hemingway.

The historical avant-garde movements also contributed to the development of experimental literature in the early and middle 20th century. In the Dadaist movement, poet Tristan Tzara employed newspaper clippings and experimental typography in his manifestoes. The futurist author F.T. Marinetti espoused a theory of "words in freedom" across the page, exploding the boundaries of both conventional narrative and the layout of the book itself as shown in his "novel" Zang Tumb Tumb. The writers, poets, and artists associated with the surrealist movement employed a range of unusual techniques to evoke mystical and dream-like states in their poems, novels, and prose works. Examples include the collaboratively-written texts Les Champs Magnétiques (by André Breton and Philippe Soupault) and Sorrow for Sorrow, a "dream novel" produced under hypnosis by Robert Desnos.

By the end of the 1930s, the political situation in Europe had made Modernism appear to be an inadequate, aestheticized, even irresponsible response to the dangers of worldwide fascism, and literary experimentalism faded from public view for a period, kept alive through the 1940s only by isolated visionaries like Kenneth Patchen. In the 1950s, the Beat writers can be seen as a reaction against the hidebound quality of both the poetry and prose of its time, and such hovering, near-mystical works as Jack Kerouac's novel Visions of Gerard represented a new formal approach to the standard narrative of that era.

The spirit of the European avant-gardes would be carried through the post-war generation as well. The poet Isidore Isou formed the Lettrist group, and produced manifestoes, poems, and films that explored the boundaries of the written and spoken word. The OULIPO (in French, Ouvroir de la littérature potentielle, or "Workshop of Potential Literature") brought together writers, artists, and mathematicians to explore innovative, combinatoric means of producing texts. Founded by the author Raymond Queneau and mathematician François Le Lionnais, the group included Italo Calvino and Georges Perec. Queneau's Cent Mille Millards de Poèmes uses the physical book itself to proliferate different sonnet combinations, while Perec's novel Life: A User's Manual is based on the Knight's Tour on a chessboard.

The 1960s brought a brief return of the glory days of modernism, and a first grounding of Post-modernism. Publicity owing to an obscenity trial against William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch brought a wide awareness of and admiration for an extreme and uncensored freedom. Burroughs also pioneered a style known as cut-up, where newspapers or typed manuscripts were cut up and rearranged to achieve lines in the text. In the late 60's, experimental movements became so prominent that even authors considered more conventional such as Bernard Malamud and Norman Mailer exhibited experimental tendencies. Metafiction was an important tendency in this period, exemplified most elaborately in the works of John Barth and Jorge Luis Borges.^{[citation needed]} In 1967 Barth wrote the essay The Literature of Exhaustion, which is sometimes considered a manifesto of postmodernism. A major touchstone of this era was Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, which eventually became a bestseller. Important authors in the short story form included Donald Barthelme, and, in both short and long forms, Robert Coover and Ronald Sukenick.

Some later well-known experimental writers of the 70's and 80's were Italo Calvino, Michael Ondaatje, and Julio Cortázar. Calvino's most famous books are If on a winter's night a traveler, where some chapters depict the reader preparing to read a book titled If on a winter's night a traveler while others form the narrative and Invisible Cities, where Marco Polo explains his travels to Kubla Khan although they are merely accounts of the very city in which they are chatting. Ondaatje's The Collected Works of Billy the Kid uses a scrapbook style to tell it's story, while Cortázar's Hopscotch can be read with the chapters in any order.

David Foster Wallace and Rick Moody, would combine some of the experimental form-play of the 60's writers with a more emotionally-deflating irony, and a greater tendency towards accessibility and humor. Wallace's Infinite Jest is a maximalist work describing life at a tennis academy and a rehab facility, however, digressions often become plotlines, and the book ultimately features over 100 pages of footnotes. Meanwhile, writers like Nicholas Baker were noted for their minimalism in novels such as The Mezzanine, about a man who rides an escalator for 140 pages. In the 2000s, Joshua Cohen (writer) emerged as one of his generation's most prominent, with his novel Witz (novel) noted for its maximalist tendencies, though some critics considered this maximalist style a dated remnant of the 1990s. American author Mark Danielewski combined elements of a horror novel with formal academic writing and typographic experimentation in his novel House of Leaves.

In the early 21st century, many examples of experimental literature reflect the emergence of computers and digital technologies, some of them actually using the medium on which they are reflecting. Such writing as been variously referred to electronic literature, hypertext, and codework. The Electronic Literature Organization has released several volumes of the Electronic Literature Collection (2006-present), which features works by John Cayley, Michael Joyce, Stuart Moulthrop, Talan Memmot, and Brian Kim Stefans. Other collections include Hard_Code: Narrating the Network Society (edited by Eugene Thacker, Alt-X Press, 2001), which includes works by Mark Amerika, Shelley Jackson, MEZ, Doug Rice, Kenji Siratori, and Steve Tomasula.

Current book publishers and periodicals dedicated to the furthering of experimental literature include 3:AM Magazine, Alt-X, American Book Review, Atlas Press, Blueprintreview, BookThug, Crossing Chaos Enigmatic Ink, Dalkey Archive Press, Evergreen Review, Exact Change, FC2, Fiction International, Fugue State Press, Hayden's Ferry Review, The Journal of Experimental Fiction, Rain Taxi, Raw Dog Screaming Press, Literary Chaos, The New Post-Literate, HTMLGIANT, and Civil Coping Mechanisms. Some older, continuing publications, including important journals such as Tri-Quarterly and Chicago Review, and publishers such as City Lights, New Directions, and Grove Press, have long emphasized innovative literature.

See also

• Absurdism
  • Absurdist fiction
  • Theatre of the Absurd
• Antinovel
• Asemic writing
• Bizarro fiction
• Concrete poetry
• Digital poetry
• Ergodic literature
• Flarf poetry
• Haptic poetry
• L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E
• Lettrism
• Magic realism
• Metafiction
• Modernist literature
• Net-poetry
• Nouveau roman
• Nonlinear (arts)
• Oulipo
• 'Pataphysics
• Postmodern literature
• Slipstream (genre)
• Surrealism
• Textbase
• Visual poetry
• Prakalpana Movement

External links

• Literary Chaos Ezine: experimental fiction and poetry
• Selby's List: contemporary journals publishing nontraditional poetry & fiction
• The Gone Lawn Excavation Project: contemporary absurdist & nontraditional authors, journals & presses
• Absurdist Monthly Review - The Writers Magazine of The New Absurdist Movement
• Fugue State Press: a book publisher specializing in "experimental" fiction
• Avance Publishing: Experimental E-Books
• AltX
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