Experimental literature
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Experimental literature are written works - often novels or magazines - that place great emphasis on innovations regarding style and technique.
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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.
Later history
Some well-known experimental writers are Italo Calvino, James Joyce, William S. Burroughs, Michael Ondaatje, Gertrude Stein, E. E. Cummings, and Julio Cortázar. 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.
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. His later work, however, such as The English Patient, shows little of his earlier innovative techniques.
See also
- Experimental literature publishing
- Antinovel
- Asemic Writing
- Ergodic literature
- Lettrism
- Metafiction
- Collage novel
- Modernist literature
- Nouveau roman
- Nonlinear (arts)
- Oulipo
- Postmodern literature
See also
- Absurdism
- Antinovel
- Asemic writing
- Bizarro fiction
- Concrete poetry
- Digital poetry
- Ergodic literature
- Flarf poetry
- Haptic poetry
- L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E
- Lettrism
- Magic realism
- Metafiction
- Modernist literature
- Net-poetry
- Nouveau roman
- Nonlinear (arts)
- Oulipo
- 'Pataphysics
- Postmodern literature
- Slipstream (genre)
- Surrealism
- Textbase
- Visual poetry
- Prakalpana Movement
