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 extraordinary text "pre-breaks" most of the "rules" that would be subsequently advanced for the writing of fiction.

As a "life story" Tristram Shandy is utterly impractical, 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 (for mourning) and a page of marbled end-paper within the text, Sterne's novel is a foundational text for many post-World War II authors. But alongside the experimental novel, critical attacks on the experimental novel are also to be found at this early period. Samuel Johnson, for instance, is quoted in Boswell as saying "The merely odd does not last. Tristram Shandy did not last."

Almost as early is Denis Diderot's Jacques the Fatalist and His Master.

20th-century history

In the early part of the 20th century, various European and American writers began experimenting with the given forms, and started various tendencies that would later be dubbed Modernism. D'Annunzio's Nocturne, the Vorticist poems of Ezra Pound, the post-WWI work of T. S. Eliot, prose and plays by Gertrude Stein, and many other examples of new forms of expression culminated in what was perhaps the most influential novel of the 20th century, Ulysses by James Joyce. The innovations in this book set off a 20-year explosion of influence that can be seen in novels by such outright modernists as Virginia Woolf, as well as in writers who are usually less generally associated with experimentalism, such as Hemingway (in In Our Time and notably in To Have and Have Not), Dos Passos, and later Ralph Ellison.

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 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. During the late 60's, the experimental was so mainstream that even more conventional authors (such as Bernard Malamud in The Tenants, and Norman Mailer in Why Are We in Vietnam?) felt obliged to at least temporarily make their styles over into something resembling a Burroughs cut-up. Metafiction was an important tendency in this period, exemplified most elaborately in the works of John Barth and Jorge Luis Borges. A major touchstone (and minor best-seller) of this era was Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, which would influence a later generation. 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. They play with form, structure, language, style, voice, and other things. Calvino's most famous experimental books are If on a winter's night a traveler, where the book itself is coming apart at the seams and the reader keeps getting new chapters, from a new book, and has to put it all together; Cosmicomics, in which Calvino tells the story of Creation; and Invisible Cities, where Marco Polo explains his travels to Kubla Khan although they are merely accounts of the very city they are chatting in.^[1]

Ondaatje's most experimental work is probably The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. This patchwork of photographs, news articles, prostitute's accounts, and diary entries tells the story of the notorious Billy the Kid.

A Pynchon-influenced generation of writers in the 1990s, such as David Foster Wallace (in Infinite Jest) and Rick Moody (in Purple America), 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, perhaps derived from the training many of these writers received in the world of large-circulation magazines.

Current book publishers and periodicals dedicated to the furthering of experimental literature include 3:AM Magazine, American Book Review, Atlas Press, Blueprintreview, BookThug, Crossing Chaos Enigmatic Ink, Dalkey Archive Press, Exact Change, FC2, Fiction International, Fugue State Press, Hayden's Ferry Review, The Journal of Experimental Fiction and Rain Taxi. 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.

References

^ Cooley, Martha. "On the Work of Italo Calvino", The Writer's Chronicle, May 2008, pp 24-32

External links

[1] Cooley, Martha. "On the Work of Italo Calvino", The Writer's Chronicle, May 2008, pp 24-32

[1]

Early history

20th-century history

See also

References

External links