Experimental literature

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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"