The routledge companion to experimental literature

2016

The notion of "experimental writing" is difficult to define with any kind of precision. Most of the time it is invoked in a largely offhanded manner, as if its meaning were immediately clear to everyone, obviating the need for further discussion. That assumption is a matter of expediency rather than anything else, for even a cursory glance at the way people use the term quickly reveals that the way we understand it varies considerably, changing over both time and cultural space. This essay seeks to examine how the idea of the experimental expresses itself in the tradition of the twentieth-century French avant-garde.

Polish Journal of English Studies, 2019

In the aftermath of a critical debate regarding the Man Booker Prize's adoption of 'readability' as the main criterion of literary value, Goldsmiths College established a new literary prize. The Goldsmiths Prize was launched in 2013 as a celebration of 'fiction that breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form.' Throughout its six editions, the prize has been awarded to such writers as Ali Smith, Nicola Barker and Eimear McBride, and has attracted a lot of media attention. Annually, its jury have written press features praising the shortlisted books, while invited novelists have given lectures on the condition of the novel. Thanks to its quickly won popularity, the Goldsmiths Prize has become the main institution promoting -- and conceptualizing -- 'experimental' fiction in Britain. This article aims to examine all the promotional material accompanying each edition-including jury statements, press releases and commissioned articles in the New Statesman-in order to analyze how the prize defines experimentalism.

Like works of literature, thought experiments present fictional narratives that prompt reflection in their readers. Because of these and other similarities, a number of philosophers have argued for a strong analogy between works of literary fiction and thought experiments, some going so far as to say that works of literary fiction are a species of thought experiment. These arguments are often used in defending a cognitivist position with regard to literature: thought experiments produce knowledge, so works of literary fiction can too. This paper concedes that works of literary fiction can be put to use in thought experiments, but not in a way that is helpful to the cognitivist. In particular, it draws three disanalogies in the ways we engage critically with thought experiments and with literary fictions. First, we use thought experiments to make arguments; second, we read thought experiments in strongly allegorical terms; and third, the terms of criticism we apply to thought experiments and to works of literature differ. Although these disanalogies present problems for the cognitivist position, they also give us a sharper picture of the distinctive educative potential of works of literary fiction.

This thesis analyses a shift in the history of experimental writing during which literary experimentation stopped being circumscribed by the historical avant-gardes and adopted a more democratic, ludic and inclusive approach to the textual experience: what I will term an experimentalism. In order to illuminate this shift I will explore works written in Paris by Julio Cortázar and Italo Calvino between 1963 and 1973, including Cortázar’s Rayuela (1963) [Hopscotch (1966)], 62: Modelo para armar (1968) [62: A Model Kit (1972)] and Libro de Manuel (1973) [A Manual for Manuel (1978)], and Calvino’s Le cosmicomiche (1965) [Cosmicomics (1968)], Il castello dei destini incrociati (1969) [The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1976)] and Le città invisibili (1972) [Invisible Cities (1974)]. I will also pay special attention to their collaboration, La fosse de Babel (1972), as it combines their experimentalisms and is pivotal to the shift I theorise. I will read this development of the experimental as a product of a history that begins with Émile Zola’s Le Roman Experimental (1880), through which the novel became a laboratory for social experiment, changing with the emergence of the historical avant-gardes between the 1910s and 1930s, as the experiment focused on language in order to challenge tradition and the establishment. I will offer a revision of Umberto Eco’s reading on this shift while challenging his ideas on the open work. This will allow me to undertake a comparative study of Cortázar’s and Calvino’s experimental writings in Paris, where other new avant-garde groups such as the nouveau roman writers were publishing innovative novels and members of the Oulipo were exploring the potentiality of literary constraints. I will, however, contend that the events of May ’68 triggered a point of no return for their experimental practices. Influenced by the Cuban revolution, Cortázar developed his revolutionary poetics further, while Calvino continued to play with combinatorial inventiveness, vouchsafing his membership in the Oulipo in 1973. Such a comparison will provide a contextual understanding to these authors’ experimentalisms at the same time that will venture a re-examination of its political and critical meanings.

American Book Review, 2016

A number of contemporary Russian writers of experimental prose have opted for writing that is liminal in many respects: short, fragmentary (sometimes suggesting or gesturing toward a larger whole), and in its structure and aesthetic priorities often calling into question the conventional boundaries between prose and poetry, fiction and documentary, or even literature and non-literature. This paper argues that the experimental prose miniature, in recent years a remarkably productive genre, is emblematic of this movement toward writing that positions itself deliberately on the border of literature and, from there, challenges the way we both write and read. In recent work by Marianna Geide and Sergey Sokolovsky, in addition to the effects of extreme brevity, elliptical references and inadequate context, a kind of basic incomprehensibility is assumed as a starting point: this quality is guaranteed by an elusive or ambiguous speaking subject and its relationship to a “world beyond the text.” “Speaking” is a crucial term here, since both Geide and Sokolovsky use direct and/or reported speech as a major device in creating ambiguity of the situation and the subject (who can be unstable in terms of gender, number and person, if not elided completely). Putting speech in the spotlight, in the form of dialogues within the text or with the reader, foregrounds the problem of literary communication, which returns us to the ways in which this work pushes the limits of what literature is or should be. The significance of speech in these texts, along with their elliptical and fragmentary qualities, can make the speaking subject seem more in line with a poetic speaker than a more traditional prosaic narrator. In this sense, Geide and Sokolovsky hark back to modernist masters of ‘prose poetry’ like Leonid Dobychin, Daniil Kharms and Feodor Sologub. But fragmentary prose can also be seen as emblematic of the present, twenty-first-century moment, in which something very much like it overwhelms the bytovoi context of internet communication: tweets, social media posts, etc. And many writers today, including Geide and Sokolovsky, first publish their short prose online. This practical dimension can have a significant effect on the perception of these texts: the instability of the subject and the basic incomprehensibility of the text can be tempered by the virtual context of the writer’s online personality, and the awareness of everyday contexts for short, elliptical texts can be seen as part of an aestheticization of the stripped-down and “non-literary.”

Post Postmodernism, 2023

What is experimental literature? How has experimentation affected the course of literary history, and how is it shaping literary expression today? Literary experiment has always been diverse and challenging, but never more so than in our age of digital media and social networking, when the very category of the literary is coming under intense pressure. How will literature reconfigure itself in the future? The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature maps this expansive and multifaceted field, with essays on: the history of literary experiment from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present the impact of new media on literature, including multimodal literature, digital fiction and code poetry the development of experimental genres from graphic narratives and found poetry through to gaming and interactive fiction experimental movements from Futurism and Surrealism to Postmodernism, Avant-Pop and Flarf. Shedding new light on often critically neglected terrain, the contributors introduce this vibrant area, define its current state, and offer exciting new perspectives on its future. This volume is the ideal introduction for those approaching the study of experimental literature for the first time or looking to further their knowledge.

2019

Most philosophers, it seems, like things neat and tidy; many hold on to the ideal that we should aim at revealing the deep structures of reality by performing clean cuts that -to use Plato's oft-quoted metaphor -»carve nature at its joints.« 1 They are not likely to accept the very idea that reality might be unstructured, messy, or chaotic, nothing but a »blooming, buzzing confusion,« 2 arbitrarily composed of a vast range of phenomena of the most different kinds. According to this image, the unstructured manifold that presents itself to our senses is overwhelming only for the untrained eye of the novice -while the sage, who knows what to look for, can discern the deeper, underlying structure of reality. In order to do so, one has to have attuned oneself -or better: one's perceptual apparatus -to the relevant aspects of our environment, one has to have figured out which properties indicate or instantiate the deep, underlying structure of reality. The natural sciences, it is often suggested, provide for privileged ways to individuate the properties that should be considered salient -or »élite«properties, 3 and scientific experiments -including thought experiments -are their most powerful means to do so.

Journal of Romance Studies, 2016

The special issue On 26 and 27 February 2015 the Institute of Modern Languages Research (IMLR) hosted a major international conference, Experimental Narratives: From the Novel to Digital Storytelling, co-organized by Godela Weiss-Sussex, Jordana Blejmar, Sam Merrill and myself. Sponsored by the MHRA, the conference explored the theme of 'narrative experimentalism' across languages, from the experimental literature of the 1960s to the most recent experiments of digital fiction. Case studies included avant-garde and postmodern experiments with the novel form, graphic novels, electronic hypertext fiction, game literature, participatory narratives, fan fiction and transmedia storytelling. Whilst confirming the international diversity of narrative experiments developed in printed literature and digital environments in the last six decades, the event also clearly identified a gap in Modern Languages research: to date, there is a significant lack of comparative studies investigating experimental narrative practices across literature and the digital outside the Anglo-American context. This is partly due to the relatively scarce production of such experimental fiction in Europe in comparison with other countries, but it has also to do with such experiments being perceived as marginal phenomena in relation to the still strong printed literary tradition. By adopting a comparative perspective across cultures, this special issue gathers contributions that address experimental fiction in both, and across, printed literature and digital media. The six articles investigate, in particular, innovative reading practices and how these are affected by the medium that conveys them. Topics include the interplay between author and reader in narratives where active user participation is not only afforded but also encouraged, remediation and transmedia practices, and readers' expectations and desires. How new forms of textuality have given a higher degree of power to readers, allowing them to interact and control the narrative, and to what extent such empowerment can be 'as elusive as it is enticing' (Ryan 2014:

Configurations, 2014

The Reasoner, 2012

Aesthetic Investigations, 2019

OPEN ACCESS. In which sense can literature be conceived as an experiment? What type of experiment and experience does literature offer and what type or dimension of reality is at stake in literary investigations? What are the ontological stakes of literature in its construction of another world or a second nature? In this essay, I address these questions in discussion with two authors who explicitly understand literature as experiment, namely Paul Ricoeur and Giorgio Agamben. To get a better sense of these ontological stakes of the experiment of literature, I will first turn to Ricoeur's account. Subsequently, I will offer a critical discussion of how his concept of configuration, a central notion in his theory of narrative, actually limits the sense of the literary experiment and its ontological stakes. This discussion will address the relation between the concepts of potentiality, contingency, and event. Finally, I will turn to Agamben's reading of Herman Melville's famous story Bartleby, the Scrivener to offer a different sense of both the ontological stakes of the literary experiment and the relation between these three concepts.

The Routledge Companion to Thought Experiments, 2018

Thought experiments are a means of imaginative reasoning that lie at the heart of philosophy, from the pre-Socratics to the modern era, and they also play central roles in a range of fields, from physics to politics. The Routledge Companion to Thought Experiments is an invaluable guide and reference source to this multifaceted subject. Comprising over 30 chapters by a team of international contributors, the Companion covers the following important areas: · the history of thought experiments, from antiquity to the trolley problem and quantum non-locality; · thought experiments in the humanities, arts, and sciences, including ethics, physics, theology, biology, mathematics, economics, and politics; · theories about the nature of thought experiments; · new discussions concerning the impact of experimental philosophy, cross-cultural comparison studies, metaphilosophy, computer simulations, idealization, dialectics, cognitive science, the artistic nature of thought experiments, and metaphysical issues. This broad ranging Companion goes backwards through history and sideways across disciplines. It also engages with philosophical perspectives from empiricism, rationalism, naturalism, skepticism, pluralism, contextualism, and neo-Kantianism to phenomenology. This volume will be valuable for anyone studying the methods of philosophy or any discipline that employs thought experiments, as well as anyone interested in the power and limits of the mind.

in: Michael Schwab (ed.): Experimental Systems. Future Knowledge in Artistic Research, Leuven: Leuven University Press (Orpheus Institue Series) 2013, S. 121–134.