Plotlessness
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
Plotlessness refers to fiction lacking plots.
Contents |
Related
boredom - digression - fiction - narratology - abstraction - kitchen sink drama - non narrative - plot - psychological novel - realism - slice of life story - stream of consciousness - sketch story
Plotless literature
18th century
- Tristram Shandy (1759), Laurence Sterne
19th century
- Bouvard et Pécuchet (1881) by Flaubert
- A Rebours (1884) by Huysmans
- Elbow-Room; A Novel Without a Plot (1876) is a novel by Charles Heber Clark
20th century
In modernist literature, plot is secondary to philosophical introspection, and the prose can be winding and hard to follow. Taking this to the extreme, we come to the anti-novel of the mid twentieth century.
Examples
- In Search of Lost Time (1913 - 1927 ) by Proust
- Nicholson Baker's novels
Plot-driven literature
Raymond Carver’s short stories
- "I love Raymond Carver’s short stories because they’re complete and perfect without much happening in them, in terms of action and plot development. What I’d like to find is some novels that are similarly “plotless”? Do they exist?
- There are Carver stories which are so good you HAVE to finish them, even though all that happens is someone goes to bingo, sees someone else there, goes home, feels sad and goes to bed. I’m looking for novels where the prime reason you keep on reading isn’t to see “what happens” but because you want to spend more time with the characters or the writing itself; ideally books where very little “happens” at all…" --metafilter, March 8, 2005
Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Plotlessness" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.
