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 "European Nineteen Teens" artistic experiment was in the air;^[1] in the early part of the century, various European and American writers began experimenting with the given forms, and started various tendencies that would later be dubbed Modernism.^{[citation needed]} 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 (1918). 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.

The historical avant-garde movements also contributed to the development of experimental literature in the early and middle 20th century. In the Dada movement, poet Tristan Tzara employed newspaper clippings and innovative 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 - from automatism to the exquisite corpse - to evoke mystical and dream-like states in their poems, novels, and prose works. Examples include the collaboratively-written texts The Magnetic Fields (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. 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.^{[citation needed]} In 1967 Barth wrote the highly influential essay The Literature of Exhaustion,^[1] which is sometimes considered a manifesto of postmodernism. 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 in which they are chatting.^[2] 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. Other writers would bring the metafictional trends of earlier generations with popular culture, resulting in what editor Larry McCaffery terms "avant-pop." McCaffery edited a first avant-pop anthology for Black Ice Books, and then a second anthology titled After Yesterday's Crash: The Avant-Pop Anthology (Penguin, 1995).

In the 2000s, Joshua Cohen (writer) has emerged as one of his generation's best "difficult" writers, with novels such as "Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto", "A Heaven of Others", and Witz (novel). American author Mark Danielewski combined elements of the gothic tale with formal and typographic experimentation in his novel House of Leaves (2000). Perhaps the most conceptual experiments have been undertaken by Kenneth Goldsmith, whose books include Soliloquy (2001; in which the author attempts to note every thought during a certain period of time) and Day (2002; in which the author transcribes line by line a copy of the New York Times).

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.

References

^ ^a ^b John Barth (1984) intro to The Literature of Exhaustion, in The Friday Book.
^ Cooley, Martha. "On the Work of Italo Calvino", The Writer's Chronicle, May 2008, pp 24-32

External links

[Barth84Exhaustion-1] John Barth (1984) intro to The Literature of Exhaustion, in The Friday Book.

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

[1]

[2]

Early history

20th-century history

See also

References

External links