In Form Digressions On The Act Of Fiction

Formmust never be taken for granted, but must be created as the work itself is shaped: "The writer works not from a priori ideas about what will happen and what form it will take, but in and through the text." Sukenick, one of our most original contemporary novelists, describes these essays as "the comments of a fiction writer about writing, not those of a critic on what has been written. They are more or less reports on experience--those of one engaged in the ongoing struggle with the angel of form, rather than of one studying its consequences from a cool distance: 'in form, ' not 'on form.'" The difficulty of creative works no longer accessible to traditional reading habits has threatened us with an age of criticism in which interpretation has be­come more imposing than invention. One of the tasks of modern fiction, therefore, is "to displace, energize, and re-embody its criticism--literally to re­unite at with our experience of the text."

In Musing the Mosaic prominent critics of postmodern and contemporary fiction and culture discuss the fictional and theoretical works of Ronald Sukenick, one of the most important American writers to emerge from the late 1960s. Sukenick has been a prolific participant in reshaping the American literary tradition for two generations and played a pivotal role in the creation and growth of the Fiction Collective and FC2 publishing houses, as well as the journals American Book Review and Black Ice Magazine. In his work he argues that contemporary fiction can neither perform traditional functions nor rely on any conventions in an ever-more dynamic world. Staying true to Sukenick's own creative style, one that takes the seams out of writing before re-stitching it in ways that are truly novel, the contributors examine how and why his writing comes closer to the dissolving, fragmentary nature of reality and its lack of closure than perhaps anything written before it.

In this trenchant and lively study Brian McHale undertakes to construct a version of postmodernist fiction which encompasses forms as wide-ranging as North American metafiction, Latin American magic realism, the French New New Novel, concrete prose and science fiction. Considering a variety of theoretical approaches including those of Ingarden, Eco, Dolezel, Pavel, and Hrushovski, McHale shows that the common denominator is postmodernist fiction's ability to thrust its own ontological status into the foreground and to raise questions about the world (or worlds) in which we live. Exploiting various theoretical approaches to literary ontology - those of Ingarden, Eco, Dolezel, Pavel, Hrushovski and others - and ranging widely over contemporary world literature, McHale assembles a comprehensive repertoire of postmodernist fiction's strategies of world-making and -unmaking.

The main aim of the book has been to include writers, movements, forms of writing and textual strategies, critical ideas, and texts that are significant in relation to postmodernist literature. In addition, important scholars, journals, and cultural processes have been included where these are felt to be relevant to an understanding of postmodernist writing. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Postmodernist Literature and Theater contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 400 cross-referenced entries on postmodernist writers, the important postmodernist aesthetic practices, significant texts produced throughout the history of postmodernist writing, and important movements and ideas that have created a variety of literary approaches within the form. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the postmodernist literature and theater.

Postmodernist literature embraces a wide range of forms and perspectives, including texts that are primarily self-reflexive; texts that use pastiche, burlesque, parody, intertextuality and hybrid forms to create textual realities that either run in opposition to or in parallel with an external reality; fabulations that develop both of these strategies; texts that ironize their relationship to reality; works that use the aspects already noted to more fully engage with political or cultural realities; texts that deal with history as a fiction; and texts that elude categorization even within the variety already explored. For example, in fiction, a postmodernist novel might tell a story about a writer struggling with writing (only, perhaps, to find that he is a character in a book by another writer struggling to write a book). The A to Z of Postmodernist Literature and Theater examines the different areas of postmodernist literature and the variety of forms that have been produced. This is accomplished through a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, and several hundred cross-referenced dictionary entries on individual postmodernist writers, the important postmodernist aesthetic practices, significant texts produced throughout the history of postmodernist writing, and important movements and ideas that have created a variety of literary approaches within the form. By placing these concerns within the historical, philosophical, and cultural contexts of postmodernism, this reference explores the frameworks within which postmodernist literature of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century operates.

Novel arguments argues that innovative fiction - by which is meant writing that has been variously labeled postmodern, metafictional, experimental - extends our ways of thinking about the world, and rejects the critical consensus that, under the rubrics of postmodernism and metafiction, homogenizes this fiction as autonomous and self-absorbed. Play, self-consciousness, and immanence - supposed symptoms of innovative fiction's autonomy - are here reconsidered as integral to its means of engagement. The book advances a concept of the "argument" of fiction as a construct wedding structure and content into a highly evolved and expressive experimental form. Close readings of five important innovative novels by Donald Barthelme, Ishmael Reed, Robert Coover, Walter Abish, and Kathy Acker show how they articulate matters of substance, social engagement, and ideological currency by virtue of the act of innovation. Walsh deftly argues for a new understanding of fictional cognition at the theoretical level, and, in an act of great critical creativity, discards altogether the flattening totalities of received postmodern formulations.

In Designs of Darkness, Arthur M. Saltzman examines some of the ways in which fiction has traditionally conspired to promote a goal-oriented vision of the work of art—and explores the ways in which postmodern (or postrealist) fiction consistently and unavoidably subverts the clarity of this vision. Offering readings of works by well-known authors, including Barthelme, Doctorow, DeLillo, and Hakes, as well as works by lesser-known writers (Auster, Gangemi), Saltzman concentrates on the breakdown of epiphany in recent fiction, both as philosophical motive and as structural foundation. In contemporary fiction, Saltzman contends, ambiguities blossom far beyond our capacities to stabilize, summarize, or restore them to sense. The old rules of the game—in which a reader looking for truth can expect come sort of satisfactory resolution—no longer apply. Literature now comes out of the answerless. Designs of Darkness in Contemporary American Fiction is a valuable new resource for scholars and students of contemporary literature.

The rise of digital publishing and the ebook has opened up an array of possibilities for the writer working with innovation in mind. Creative Writing and the Radical uses an examination of how experimental writers in the past have explored the possibilities of multimodal writing to theorise the nature of writing fiction in the future. It is clear that experimental writers rehearsed for technological advances long before they were invented. Through an in-depth study of writers and their motivations, challenges and solutions, the author explores the shifts creative writing teachers and students will need to make in order to adapt to a new era of fiction writing and reading.