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 .

Contents

[edit] 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 postmodern 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.

[edit] Experimental Literature Today

Some of the most well-known experimental writers today are Italo Calvino, 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 from a slightly scientific and very bizarre perspective; and Invisible Cities, where Marco Polo explains his vast 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. The structure of the book is deconstructed and somehow fits the topic and theme perfectly.



[edit] See also

[edit] External links

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