Experimental Fiction

3 Key excerpts on "Experimental Fiction"

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  eBook - ePub

  The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature

  • (Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  1 Introduction Joe Bray, Alison Gibbons and Brian McHale DOI: 10.4324/9780203116968-1 I What is experimental literature? Experimental literature, as the contents of this Routledge Companion amply testify, is irreducibly diverse. Unfettered improvisation and the rigorous application of rules, accidental composition and hyper-rational design, free invention and obsessively faithful duplication, extreme conceptualism and extreme materiality, multimediality and media-specificity, being “born digital” and being hand-made – all of these, and many others, are ways of being experimental in literature. Despite this diversity, however, a number of common threads (some of which will be explored below) traverse experimental literary practice across the twentieth century and right up to the present. The one feature that all literary experiments share is their commitment to raising fundamental questions about the very nature and being of verbal art itself. What is literature, and what could it be? What are its functions, it limitations, its possibilities? These are the sorts of questions that “mainstream” literature, at all periods – commercial bestseller literature, but also the “classics” once they have been canonized, domesticated and rendered fit for unreflective consumption – is dedicated to repressing. Experimental literature unrepresses these fundamental questions, and in doing so it lays everything open to challenge, reconceptualization and reconfiguration. Experimentation makes alternatives visible and conceivable, and some of these alternatives become the foundations for future developments, whole new ways of writing, some of which eventually filter into the mainstream itself

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  Samuel Beckett and Experimental Psychology

  Perception, Attention, Imagery

  • Joshua Powell(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  Bray, Gibbons and McHale 2012 : 3). Their volume aims to ‘rescue’ the term from this context by emphasizing the sense in which the literary experiment is unconventional and cutting edge (3). In the sense that they use it, literary experiments name the process ‘of change and renewal’ by which literature reinvents itself (1). The terms ‘avant-garde’, ‘experimental’ and ‘innovative’ are amalgamated into the single term ‘experimental’. This term, it is hoped, will be instilled with ‘connotations of edginess, renovation and aesthetic adventure’ (3). In this context, experimental literature can be ‘irreducibly diverse’ (1). A literary experiment merely has to ask the ontological questions that mainstream literature is ‘dedicated to repressing’: ‘What is literature and what could it be? What are its functions its limitations its possibilities’ (1)?

  This study will set itself up in opposition to this broad definition of experimental literature. Some very interesting insights may come from the amalgamation of the terms ‘avant-garde’, ‘innovative’ and ‘experimental’ within a broad volume such as the Routledge Companion . But I think it is important that the terms do not lose their particularity. The editors point out that ‘aesthetic avant-gardism continues to be allied with political radicalism in a number of twentieth- and twenty-first-century artistic and literary movements’ (1–2). If these movements are allied more with ‘political radicalism’ than with scientific experimentation, why label them ‘experimental’ and not ‘avant-garde’? Similarly, it will be my contention that twentieth-century literature had a relationship with scientific experimentation that went beyond the contest for cultural privilege. Rather than the all-encompassing version of experimental literature put forward in the Routledge Companion , I will identify a more limited tradition of literary experimentation. The editors of the Routledge Companion

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  Literature and Understanding

  The Value of a Close Reading of Literary Texts

  • Jon Phelan(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Fiction is a species of language use (applied to names, sentences and discourses) and is neutral as to value. Literature, even in the narrowest sense applied to imaginative and creative writing, is a kind of discourse, essentially valued, which affords and invites a distinctive kind of appreciation.

  (Lamarque 2014: 69)

  Actually, ‘fiction’ is subject to evaluation on some occasions. Karl May was condemned when his novels set in the Wild West, and reputedly based on fact, were revealed as fiction. In this instance, the disappointment of many readers extended beyond disappointment at being hoodwinked to dissatisfaction at being left with ‘mere fiction’. In another type of case, fiction may be criticised for containing factual inaccuracy. A novel set in Cambridge which contains the line ‘I left Magdalene College and walked across the road to the Fitzwilliam Museum’ contains a factual accuracy and one that would disturb a reader familiar with the city. Let us also imagine that this detail served no purpose in the novel so could not be excused as ‘poetic license’. This type of case results in a kind of imaginative resistance, of a non-moral kind, which leads to a negative evaluation of the work. Here genre convention plays a role in evaluation. If the novel is realist fiction and if a particular detail is wrong about the subject depicted, then the novel may be criticised for containing an error. In this second example, the work is criticised for being ‘too fictional’ given the genre conventions of realist fiction.

  Nevertheless, it is true that describing a work as a work of ‘fiction’ is not usually evaluative but the kind of categorisation publishers use to help readers distinguish what is invented from what is fact; for instance, to differentiate ‘true crime’ from ‘detective fiction’. In contrast, calling a work ‘literature’ is predominantly evaluative and involves some form of aesthetic appreciation. This kind of literary appreciation seems separate from personal preference; I may recognise a late Henry James novel as literature without the work being to my taste. The upshot of this brief discussion is that I am loath to dismiss the evaluative aspect of literature as it corresponds with our ordinary usage of the term and captures something of the Gestalt of reading a text as a work of literature.

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