Experimental literature

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Experimental literature is a genre of literature that is generally "difficult to define with any sort of precision."[1] It experiments with the conventions of literature, including boundaries of genres and styles; for example, it can be written in the form of prose narratives or poetry, but the text may be set on the page in differing configurations than that of normal prose paragraphs or in the classical stanza form of verse.[1] It may also incorporate art or photography. Furthermore, while experimental literature was traditionally handwritten, the digital age has seen an exponential use of writing experimental works with word processors.[1]

Early history

The first text generally cited in this category is

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,

modernist movement.[citation needed] The Cantos of Ezra Pound, the post-World War I 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[according to whom?] the most essential work of the period. The novel not only influenced more experimental writers, such as Virginia Woolf, but also less experimental writers, such as Ernest Hemingway
.

The historical avant-garde movements also contributed to the development of experimental literature in the early and middle 20th century. In the

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 danger of worldwide

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. American novelists such as John Hawkes
started publishing novels in the late 1940s that played with the conventions of narrative.

The spirit of the European avant-gardes would be carried through the post-war generation as well. The poet

Lettrist group, and produced manifestoes, poems, and films that explored the boundaries of the written and spoken word. The OULIPO (in French, Ouvroir de 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 Milliards 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 British

cut-up, where newspapers or typed manuscripts were cut up and rearranged to achieve lines in the text. In the late 1960s, 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, Jonathan Bayliss, and Jorge Luis Borges.[citation needed] In 1967 Barth wrote the essay The Literature of Exhaustion,[2] 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. While in 1968 William H. Gass's novel Willie Masters Lonesome Wife added challenging dimensions to reading as some of the pages are in mirror writing
where the text can only be read if a mirror is held in an angle against the page.

Some later well-known experimental writers of the 1970s and 1980s were

Hopscotch
can be read with the chapters in any order.

Argentine

José Lezama Lima.[5]

Contemporary American authors

Mark Danielewski combined elements of a horror novel with formal academic writing and typographic experimentation in his novel House of Leaves
.

Greek author Dimitris Lyacos in Z213: Exit combines, in a kind of a modern-day palimpsest, the diary entries of two narrators in a heavily fragmented text, interspersed with excerpts from the biblical Exodus, to recount a journey along which the distinct realities of inner self and outside world gradually merge.

21st-century history

In the early 21st century, many examples of experimental literature reflect the emergence of

computers and other digital technologies, some of them actually using the medium on which they are reflecting, such as Patricia Lockwood's 2021 internet novel No One Is Talking About This, which was mostly composed on an iPhone. Such writing has been variously referred to electronic literature, hypertext, and codework. Others have focused on exploring the plurality of narrative point of views, like the Uruguayan American writer Jorge Majfud in La reina de América
and La ciudad de la luna.

See also

References

  1. ^
    doi:10.4148/2334-4415.1927
    .
  2. ^ a b John Barth (1984) intro to The Literature of Exhaustion, in The Friday Book.
  3. ^ "Why Britain's Angry Young Men Boil Over". Life. 1958-05-26. p. 138. Retrieved 2023-05-13.
  4. ^ Cooley, Martha. "On the Work of Italo Calvino", The Writer's Chronicle, May 2008, pp 24-32
  5. ^ Americas Society's Latin American Literature Roster, 2005.

Bibliography

  • Bäckström, Per. Vårt brokigas ochellericke! Om experimentell poesi (Our Gaudy Andornot!. On Experimental Poetry), Lund: Ellerström, 2010.
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