REFLECTION: An Experiment in Experimental Poetry and Prose

Although graphic novels are certainly multimodal, Gibbons chooses not to discuss them, preferring instead to view such works as a genre in their own right. In her chapter on graphic narrative, Hilary Chute considers the relationship of comics to literary experimentation.

In support of her argument, Chute invites readers on a tour of experimental comic practice starting in the early twentieth century, continuing into the late twentieth century and concluding with the comics of today. While literature has incorporated the visual in experimental practices, art has assimilated the verbal. Consequently, Prinz intimates, the boundaries between art and literature are blurring and dissipating. The literary and the artistic are no longer necessarily distinct types of aesthetic artefact.

From the beginning of the twentieth century right down to the present, experimental literature has had to find ways to coexist with other, competing media — visual art, music in a range of genres, performance, photography, film, television, digital media — competitors that have expanded in number, power, appeal and market-share over the course of the century. A common thread uniting several of the chapters in this volume is experimentation with these other, adjacent media.

In some cases this experimentation has taken the form of collaboration across media, or even co-optation of one medium by another; in other cases, it has been more akin to baiting a threatening competitor, poking at this dangerous beast through the bars of its cage to stir it up and see how it reacts. According to Ben Lee, in his chapter on postwar avant-garde poetry in the U. Crucial to the aesthetic formation of this generation of poets was their encounter with experimental, collaborative cross-media practices, which some experienced in the New York artworld while others encountered it at Black Mountain College in rural North Carolina, an incubator of mid-twentieth-century avant-gardism.

A similar cross-fertilization among the arts is explored by Aldon Nielsen in his chapter on the experimental strain in African-American poetry, which he seeks to recover through case studies of two pivotal but undervalued figures: Melvin Tolson and Lorenzo Thomas. Cross-media experimentation and the poaching of models from adjacent media, features of both the New American Poetry and the African-American avant-garde, become defining characteristics of the Avant-Pop tendency in contemporary literature.

It has much in common with jazz, readymade art, collage and montage practices, and sound sampling and mashup in popular music, and its aesthetics are perfectly suited to the newer digital media. Robert McLaughlin discerns quite a different relation to contemporary popular culture, a much more adversarial one, in the tendency that he calls not without reservations post-postmodernism. The post-postmodernist fiction of novelists such as Jonathan Franzen, Richard Powers, Jonathan Lethem, and especially David Foster Wallace responds both to the perceived exhaustion of literary postmodernism and to the growing dominance of television in popular culture.

According to Philip Mead similar questions are also raised by various forms of literary hoax. Process-oriented writing invites us into the workshop to witness the experiment as it unfolds, and increasingly, especially with the emergence of interactive digital media, to participate in it directly. One of the avant-garde groups surveyed here literally describes itself as a workshop: As Jan Baetens explains, the OuLiPo group researches and practices procedural or constrained writing; it rediscovers and revives, or invents from scratch, extra or supplementary rules and conventions of literary production, and then applies them.

It literally conducts experiments in writing, and it often does so in plain view. OuLiPian practice also has implications for our understanding of artistic or authorial control. Uncreative writing is all process, as it were. Originating nothing, it appropriates and recycles readymade verbal material, whether read, spoken or culled from the internet. Duplicating texts that already exist, its products are strictly speaking redundant , and in that sense valueless.

What more profound challenge could be posed to dominant aesthetic ideologies of self-expression, originality and the personal voice? This act of vandalism implies a strategy: Just as Ducamp takes a picture , so post-criticism takes thought. In their chapters, Baetens and Epstein report on avant-garde groups that usher us into the workshops where writing experiments are conducted, but Ulmer goes a step further. His chapter is itself such a workshop, and in visiting it we are privileged to witness how post-criticism is made — the very process of its emergence. Decisions concerning the composition of a novel are part and parcel of the process of creating experimental forms.

In writing a novel, authors have to choose how to arrange their text, be it in terms of narrative progression, graphological layout, or conventional structure such as chapter divisions. Ultimately, information design creates the pathways for reading. Pathways of reading are fundamental in the arena of digital fiction. He also mentions digital interactive fiction IF which requires textual input from reader-user-players for narrative advancement. Each type shows that information design, and specifically the form of link and node particular to digital fiction, impacts upon reading pathways, for instance, in the case of re-reading text, recycling nodes and reordering narrative.

In doing so, they suggest the subdivision of printed interactive works into three categories: This enables them to offer an analysis which tracks the complex ways in which readers construct, develop and revise storyworlds from their interactions with such texts. Marie-Laure Ryan also employs a model of worlds as mental representations, that of possible worlds as developed from philosophy and logic. In looking at the impossible worlds of experimental literature, Ryan is interested in texts which transgress logical laws and therefore challenge the imagination.

Through the course of her essay, she offers a catalog of the forms of impossibility in experimental literature: The pathways presented by impossible worlds are both ontological in their inconsistency and unfeasibility, and cognitive in the sense that readers must negotiate unresolved paradoxes. In each case, according to Ensslin, unreflective, fully immersive gamer behaviour is challenged and a more attentive and critical kind of engagement promoted.

Irene Kacandes is also concerned with the ways in which experimental literature can be experienced.

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This introduction began with a qualification of what it meant to experiment, intimating that the history of experimentation in literature might be considered as old as the history of literature itself. But what might the future hold? Already at the beginning of the twentieth-century, the Futurists claimed that their experiments enabled them to produce a literature of tomorrow. Well, when is tomorrow? In light of the evidence of this companion — its retrospective view of the historical avant-gardes and of postmodernism and its descendants, its survey of explorations in language, narrative, form, and media, and its account of the aesthetics of the present — it remains to ask: What might we expect from the new frontier of experimental literature?

Futurological predictions inevitably fall short: Since , the refrain has gone up, louder year by year: And here we are, around the corner, and none of it is standing here. Any act of future-thinking is, in itself, a work of fiction, and the imagined possibilities are thought-experiments. We may, therefore, envisage an experimental literature that addresses what may be seen as the contaminated rule of capitalism. Alternatively, the increasing concern over the environment, global warming and the end of the world, seemingly supported by a surge of natural disasters earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, catastrophic storms , might spur the development of a politicized, experimental eco-literature.

The proliferation of technology in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries certainly suggests further potentialities for literary innovation. What does the e-reader, Kindle, or i-pad have to offer the literary work? What more might the World Wide Web have to offer? Media scholars cite the development of Web 2. Will works become progressively more hybridized in form, in terms of genre, modes, and media? And will the incessant flow of data and information rolling news, twitter feeds affect the form and process of texts, leading to still more appropriation or recycling in composition?

However grounded in the past and the present, these previsions of the future, predictions of the forthcoming, are no more than fancy. Works Cited Calinescu, M. Duke University Press, Fiction Now … and Tomorrow , ed.

Development of the English language

University of Nebraska Press. Digressions on the Act of Fiction, Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press. The form that really set its face against Elizabethan politeness was the satire. Satire was related to the complaint , of which there were notable examples by Daniel The Complaint of Rosamond , and Shakespeare The Rape of Lucrece , that are dignified and tragic laments in supple verse. But the Elizabethans mistakenly held the term satire to derive from the Greek satyros , a satyr, and so set out to match their manner to their matter and make their verses snarl.

In the works of the principal satirists, Donne five satires, —98 , Joseph Hall Virgidemiarum , —98 , and Marston Certain Satires and The Scourge of Villainy , , the denunciation of vice and folly repeatedly tips into invective, raillery, and sheer abuse. Their continuing attraction resides in their self-contradictory delight in the world they profess to abhor and their evident fascination with the minutiae of life in court and city.

They were enthusiastically followed by Everard Guilpin, Samuel Rowlands, Thomas Middleton , and Cyril Tourneur , and so scandalous was the flood of satires that in their printing was banned. The writers listed above all use an unpretentious style, enlivened with a vivid vocabulary; the early prose fiction, on the other hand, delights in ingenious formal embellishment at the expense of narrative economy.

This runs up against preferences ingrained in the modern reader by the novel , but Elizabethan fiction is not at all novelistic and finds room for debate, song, and the conscious elaboration of style. The existence of an audience for polite fiction was signaled in the collections of stories imported from France and Italy by William Painter , Geoffrey Fenton , and George Pettie There were later collections by Barnaby Rich and George Whetstone ; historically, their importance was as sources of plots for many Elizabethan plays.

The Anatomy of Wit , which, with its sequel Euphues and His England , set a fashion for an extreme rhetorical mannerism that came to be known as euphuism. Dozens of imitations of Arcadia and Euphues followed from the pens of Greene, Lodge, Anthony Munday , Emanuel Forde, and others; none has much distinction. His air of maturity and detachment has recommended him to modern tastes, but no more than his opponents was he above the cut and thrust of controversy.

On the contrary, his magisterial rhetoric was designed all the more effectively to fix blame onto his enemies, and even his account in Books VI—VIII of the relationship of church and state was deemed too sensitive for publication in the s. His only rival is Thomas Deloney , whose Jack of Newbury , The Gentle Craft —98 , and Thomas of Reading are enduringly attractive for their depiction of the lives of ordinary citizens, interspersed with elements of romance, jest book, and folktale.

In this respect, as in so many others, the role of the drama was crucial. In the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, the theatre was the focal point of the age. Public life was shot through with theatricality—monarchs ruled with ostentatious pageantry, rank and status were defined in a rigid code of dress—while on the stages the tensions and contradictions working to change the nation were embodied and played out.

More than any other form, the drama addressed itself to the total experience of its society. Playgoing was inexpensive, and the playhouse yards were thronged with apprentices, fishwives, labourers, and the like, but the same play that was performed to citizen spectators in the afternoon would often be restaged at court by night.

Moreover, the theatre was fully responsive to the developing technical sophistication of nondramatic literature. In the hands of Shakespeare, the blank verse employed for translation by the earl of Surrey in the first half of the 16th century became a medium infinitely mobile between extremes of formality and intimacy, while prose encompassed both the control of Hooker and the immediacy of Nashe. This was above all a spoken drama, glorying in the theatrical energies of language. And the stage was able to attract the most technically accomplished writers of its day because it offered, uniquely, a literary career with some realistic prospect of financial return.

The decisive event was the opening of the Theatre , considered the first purpose-built London playhouse, in , and during the next 70 years some 20 theatres more are known to have operated. The quantity and diversity of plays they commissioned are little short of astonishing. The London theatres were a meeting ground of humanism and popular taste. They inherited, on the one hand, a tradition of humanistic drama current at court, the universities, and the Inns of Court collegiate institutions responsible for legal education.

• The Ghostly and the Ghosted in Literature and Film: Spectral Identities.
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• The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature: Introduction and table of contents.
• Creative Writing: Innovation and Experiment | University of Salford, Manchester.

This tradition involved the revival of Classical plays and attempts to adapt Latin conventions to English, particularly to reproduce the type of tragedy, with its choruses, ghosts, and sententiously formal verse, associated with Seneca 10 tragedies by Seneca in English translation appeared in It is also the earliest known English play in blank verse. On the other hand, all the professional companies performing in London continued also to tour in the provinces, and the stage was never allowed to lose contact with its roots in country show, pastime, and festival.

A third tradition was that of revelry and masques, practiced at the princely courts across Europe and preserved in England in the witty and impudent productions of the schoolboy troupes of choristers who sometimes played in London alongside the professionals.

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Courtly revel reached its apogee in England in the ruinously expensive court masques staged for James I and Charles I , magnificent displays of song, dance, and changing scenery performed before a tiny aristocratic audience and glorifying the king. The principal masque writer was Ben Jonson , the scene designer Inigo Jones. The first generation of professional playwrights in England has become known collectively as the university wits. Their nickname identifies their social pretensions, but their drama was primarily middle class, patriotic, and romantic. Their preferred subjects were historical or pseudo-historical, mixed with clowning, music, and love interest.

Peele was a civic poet, and his serious plays are bold and pageantlike; The Arraignment of Paris is a pastoral entertainment, designed to compliment Elizabeth. In his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and James IV , the antics of vulgar characters complement but also criticize the follies of their betters. Only Lyly, writing for the choristers, endeavoured to achieve a courtly refinement.

His Gallathea and Endimion are fantastic comedies in which courtiers, nymphs, and goddesses make rarefied love in intricate, artificial patterns, the very stuff of courtly dreaming.



Outshining all these is Christopher Marlowe , who alone realized the tragic potential inherent in the popular style, with its bombast and extravagance. They patently address themselves to the anxieties of an age being transformed by new forces in politics, commerce, and science; indeed, the sinister , ironic prologue to The Jew of Malta is spoken by Machiavelli.

His plays thus present the spectator with dilemmas that can be neither resolved nor ignored, and they articulate exactly the divided consciousness of their time. There is a similar effect in The Spanish Tragedy c. We welcome suggested improvements to any of our articles. You can make it easier for us to review and, hopefully, publish your contribution by keeping a few points in mind. Your contribution may be further edited by our staff, and its publication is subject to our final approval.

The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature: Introduction and table of contents | Jacket2

Unfortunately, our editorial approach may not be able to accommodate all contributions. Our editors will review what you've submitted, and if it meets our criteria, we'll add it to the article. Please note that our editors may make some formatting changes or correct spelling or grammatical errors, and may also contact you if any clarifications are needed. Elizabethan poetry and prose English poetry and prose burst into sudden glory in the late s. Previous page The Renaissance period: Page 7 of Learn More in these related Britannica articles: One exception is 14th-century England, where a national literature made a brilliant showing in the works of William Langland, John Gower, and, above all, Geoffrey Chaucer.

The troubled 15th century, however, produced only feeble imitations. Another exception is the vigorous tradition of chronicle writing in French, distinguished by such…. Of the odd books he printed, 74 were in English, of which 22 were his own translations. Some, such as the Ordre of Chyvalry and….

Elizabethan poetry and prose

British Isles , group of islands off the northwestern coast of Europe. The group consists of two main islands, Great Britain and Ireland, and numerous smaller islands and island groups, including the Hebrides, the Shetland Islands, the Orkney Islands, the Isles of Scilly, and the Isle of Man. More About English literature 18 references found in Britannica articles Assorted References contribution by Caxton In history of publishing: Literature science fiction In science fiction: