Experimental fiction

Poll without page-refresh

Article on other languages:

	del.icio.us
	Digg
	Furl
	Reddit
	Rojo
	Add to OnlyWire

Please help improve this article or section by expanding it. Further information might be found on the talk page. (January 2007)

This needs additional citations for verification.
Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (June 2006)

Literature Portal
Topics
Epic • Romance • Novel • Prose • Poetry • Books • Authors • Awards • Basic Topics • Literary Terms • Criticism • Theory
Middle-Eastern Literature
Ancient literature • Sumerian literature • Babylonian literature • Ancient Egyptian literature • Hebrew literature • Pahlavi literature • Persian literature • Arabic literature • Israeli literature
European Literature
Greek literature • Latin literature
Early Medieval literature
Matter of Rome • Matter of France • Matter of Britain
Medieval literature
Renaissance literature
History of modern literature
Structuralism • Deconstruction • Poststructuralism • Modernism • Postmodernism • Post-colonialism • Hypertext fiction
North and South American Literature
Latin American literature • Argentine literature • Brazilian literature • Canadian literature • Colombian literature • Cuban literature • Jamaican literature • Mexican literature • Peruvian literature • Literature of the United States
Australasian Literature
Australian literature • New Zealand literature
Asian Literature
Asian literature • Chinese literature • Japanese literature • Korean literature • Vietnamese literature
Indian Sub-Continent Literature
Sanskrit literature
Indian literature • Pakistani literature • Assamese literature • Bengali literature • Gujarati literature • Hindi literature • Kannada literature • Kashmiri literature • Malayalam literature • Marathi literature • Nepali literature • Rajasthani literature • Sindhi literature • Tamil literature • Telugu literature • Urdu literature • Indian writing in English
African Literature
African literature • Nigerian literature • Moroccan literature • South African literature • Swahili literature
Other Topics
History of theatre • History of science fiction • History of ideas • Intellectual history • List of years in literature • Literature by nationality

Experimental literature refers to written works - often novels or magazines - that place great emphasis on innovations regarding technique and style. The term “experimental″ is problematic because it is hard to define and doesn't point directly at any group of writers because experimental writers are each so different. Also, the techniques used by each writer vary. Even famous experimental writers are not necessarily known as experimental, but fall under various different groups. The term continues to be controversial also because people believe it denotes a certain lack of craft--an unpolished quality (when that is quite the opposite).

1 Early history
2 Experimental Literature Today
3 See also
4 References
5 External links

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.

Experimental Literature Today

Some well-known experimental writers are Italo Calvino, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, William S. Burroughs, Michael Ondaatje, Gertrude Stein, E. E. Cummings, and Julio Cortazar. 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. Ondaatje uses some very interesting techniques, including writing about a photo as if it's there when the reader doesn't see anything but blank space.

References

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

External links

Literary Chaos Ezine: the web's best experimental fiction and poetry
Selby's List: contemporary journals publishing nontraditional poetry & fiction
The Gone Lawn Excavation Project: contemporary absurdist & nontraditional authors, journals & presses
To view three contemporary experimental novels, see http://bradmusil.kramernet.org

How to

Thornton, Norman. "Re-Ending Technique and the Re-Ender Tool" (web application focused on poetic writes for sound effects and visual rhyme though can be repurposed). Retrieved on Sept 13, 2007. Retrieved on 9, 13, 2007.

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_literature"