experimental fiction
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Experiments with Fiction, Part 3
No exploration of experimental fiction would be complete without reference to the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (Workshop of Potential Literature), or Oulipo. This literary circle, founded by the Surrealist Marcel Duchamp and some friends in France in 1960, literally plays with words. The group is famous for making an almost mathematical use of “constraints” to… Continue reading
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Experiments with Fiction, Part 2
In my first post on experimental fiction, I mentioned the Library of Congress and its creation of the term, but I didn’t communicate how idiosyncratically the term is used. The good people at the Library of Congress created the term, but applied it in ways that might puzzle the attentive reader. Why, for instance, does… Continue reading
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Experiments with Fiction, Part 1
I recently read a strange little book by Tao Lin, called Eeeee Eee Eeee. It is fiction, a novel of sorts, although its characters are almost uniformly flat and disaffected (including the dolphins and the bears), anything resembling a plot dissolves after a few pages of slightly bored or mildly anxious introspection, and the language… Continue reading
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New literary craze has readers topsy-turvy!
Readers of avant-garde literature are flipping over the latest experimental wrinkle in fiction. Inspired by the narrative hijinx of such post-modern stylists as the late David Foster Wallace, and Mark Danielewski (whose Only Revolutions asks the reader to rotate the book while reading), a bold new breed of writers and publishers are literally overturning the literary scene with what may be the… Continue reading