Reading Experimental Writing

Explores the challenges and significance of experimental writing Offers a forum for reflecting on the significance of avant-garde writing for the twenty-first century Explores the way in which contemporary experimental writers engage with socio-political issues Utilizes unpublished archive materials bringing to light a number of previously unpublished worksIncludes innovative readings of significant avant-garde writers previously neglected in the critical canonBringing together internationally leading scholars whose work engages with the continued importance of literary experiment, this book takes up the question of 'reading' in the contemporary climate from culturally and linguistically diverse perspectives. New reading practices are both offered and traced in avant-garde writers across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including John Cage, Kathy Acker, Charles Bernstein, Erica Hunt, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Rosmarie Waldrop, Joan Retallack, M. NourbeSe Philip, Caroline Bergvall, Uljana Wolf, Samantha Gorman and Dave Jhave Johnston, among others. Exploring the socio-political significance of literary experiment, the book yields new critical approaches to reading avant-garde writing.

Explores the challenges and significance of experimental writing Offers a forum for reflecting on the significance of avant-garde writing for the twenty-first century Explores the way in which contemporary experimental writers engage with socio-political issues Utilizes unpublished archive materials bringing to light a number of previously unpublished worksIncludes innovative readings of significant avant-garde writers previously neglected in the critical canonBringing together internationally leading scholars whose work engages with the continued importance of literary experiment, this book takes up the question of 'reading' in the contemporary climate from culturally and linguistically diverse perspectives. New reading practices are both offered and traced in avant-garde writers across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including John Cage, Kathy Acker, Charles Bernstein, Erica Hunt, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Rosmarie Waldrop, Joan Retallack, M. NourbeSe Philip, Caroline Bergvall, Uljana Wolf, Samantha Gorman and Dave Jhave Johnston, among others. Exploring the socio-political significance of literary experiment, the book yields new critical approaches to reading avant-garde writing.

Ever since Ezra Pound's exhortation to 'make it new', experimentation has been a hallmark of contemporary literature. Ranging from the modernists, through the Beats to postmodernism and contemporary 'hyperfiction', this is a unique introduction to experimental fiction. Creative exercises throughout the book help students grapple with the many varieties of experimental fiction for themselves, deepening their understanding of these many forms and developing their own writing skills. In addition, the book examines the historical contexts and major themes of 20th-century experimental fiction and new directions for the novel offered by writers such as David Shields and Zadie Smith. Making often difficult works accessible for the first time reader and with extensive further reading guides, Experimental Fiction is an essential practical guidebook for students of creative writing and contemporary fiction. Writers covered include: James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, Ralph Ellison, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William Gibson, Italo Calvino, Jeanette Winterson, Don Delillo, Caitlin Fisher, Geoff Ryeman, Xiaolu Guo, Tom McCarthy, James Frey and David Mitchell.

This collection of essays offers twelve innovative approaches to contemporary literary criticism. The contributors, women scholars who range from undergraduate students to contingent faculty to endowed chairs, stage a critical dialogue that raises vital questions about the aims and forms of criticism— its discourses and politics, as well as the personal, institutional, and economic conditions of its production. Offering compelling feminist and queer readings of avant-garde twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts, the essays included here are playful, performative, and theoretically savvy. Written for students, scholars, and professors in literature and creative writing, Reading and Writing Experimental Texts provides examples for doing literary scholarship in innovative ways. These provocative readings invite conversation and community, reminding us that if the stakes of critical innovation are high, so are the pleasures.

From the outset, experimental writing has been viewed as a means to afford a more creative space for students to express individuality, underrepresented social realities, and criticisms of dominant socio-political discourses and their institutions. Yet, the recent trend toward multimedia texts has left many composition instructors with little basis from which to assess these new forms and to formulate pedagogies. In this original study, Patricia Suzanne Sullivan provides a critical history of experimental writing theory and its aesthetic foundations and demonstrates their application to current multimodal writing. Sullivan unpacks the work of major scholars in composition and rhetoric and their theories on aesthetics, particularly avant-gardism. She also relates the dialectics that shape these aesthetics and sheds new light on both the positive and negative aspects of experimental writing and its attempts to redefine the writing disciplines. Additionally, she shows how current debates over the value of multimedia texts echo earlier arguments that pitted experimental writing against traditional models. Sullivan further articulates the ways that multimedia is and isn't changing composition pedagogies, and provides insights into resolving these tensions.

Ever since Ezra Pound's exhortation to 'make it new', experimentation has been a hallmark of contemporary literature. Ranging from the modernists, through the Beats to postmodernism and contemporary 'hyperfiction', this is a unique introduction to experimental fiction. Creative exercises throughout the book help students grapple with the many varieties of experimental fiction for themselves, deepening their understanding of these many forms and developing their own writing skills. In addition, the book examines the historical contexts and major themes of 20th-century experimental fiction and new directions for the novel offered by writers such as David Shields and Zadie Smith. Making often difficult works accessible for the first time reader and with extensive further reading guides, Experimental Fiction is an essential practical guidebook for students of creative writing and contemporary fiction. Writers covered include: James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, Ralph Ellison, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William Gibson, Italo Calvino, Jeanette Winterson, Don Delillo, Caitlin Fisher, Geoff Ryeman, Xiaolu Guo, Tom McCarthy, James Frey and David Mitchell.

An inspiring guide to the practices of contemporary experimental creative writing, this book explores experimentation within both traditional writing genres and 'post-genre' modes such as hybrid texts, Non-creative writing, textual materiality, creative re-purposing, performance and new media technologies. Combining the practices, history, social context, and philosophical backgrounds of experimental work with a broad anthology of models in-book and online, Experimental Writing gives you the toolkit of techniques and skills to confidently engage with forms previously perceived as intimidating so that you can reinvigorate your craft. In addition, the book includes sections on new approaches to the workshop model, emphasis on community and collaboration, and institutional critique. These chapters will provide you with a “big picture” perspective and the motivation to question the templates you work within, giving you the where-with-all to shape your own ideals for writing, no matter what their stylistic choices. Within its broad scope, Experimental Writing covers: - a comprehensive survey of relevant movements, texts, authors, and techniques of non-traditional forms - a survey of evolving trends with exemplars of how genres can be disrupted to help you appreciate experimental styles - demonstrations of how more diverse and innovative pedagogical interventions have the potential to inspire your creativity and create more original work - an examination of the institutional forces that have shaped the creative writing landscape you inhabit, to prompt you to re-examine the pressures, cultural biases, and power structures that have shaped both your aesthetic vision and potential future career paths - frameworks for independent research, practitioner interviews, and motivating questions to get you thinking and questioning before you encounter each new topic With each chapter accompanied by stimulating pedagogical features such as a timeline of experimental writing, free writes, games and constraints, reflections, exercises, prompts and case studies throughout, this invaluable text reveals wider horizon for your artistic endeavors and will activate your critical thinking about a range of issues and ideas. Additional online resources for this book can be found at http://www.bloomsburyonlineresources.com/experimental-writing-a-writers-guide-and-anthology.

This book explores the history of women’s engagement with writing experimentally. Women writers have long used different narratives and modes of writing as a way of critiquing worlds and stories that they find themselves at odds with, but at the same time, as a way to participate in such spaces. Experimentation—of style, mode, voice, genre and language—has enabled women writers to be simultaneously creative and critical, engaged in and yet apart from stories and cultures that have so often seen them as ‘other’. This collection shows that women writers in English over the past 400 years have challenged those ideas not only through explicit polemic and alternative representations but through disrupting the very modes of representation and story itself.