Theme: Experimentation in American literature Group: 223 Done by: Nurmuratova Laylo Supervisor: Abdumalikova Fotima

Chapter I Experimentation in American literature

1.1 Experimental literature.

Experimental literature is a genre that is, according to Professor Warren Motte of the University of Colorado in his essay Experimental Writing, Experimental Reading, "difficult to define with any sort of precision." He says the "writing is often invoked in an "offhand manner" and the focus is on "form rather than content." It can be in written form of prose narrative or poetry, but the text may be set on the page in differing configurations than that of normal prose paragraphs or in the classical stanza form of verse. It may also be entwined with images of a real or abstract nature, with the use of art or photography. Furthermore, while experimental literature was handwritten on paper or vellum, the digital age has seen an exponential leaning to the use of digital computer technologies.

In the 1910s, artistic experimentation became a prominent force, and various European and American writers began experimenting with the given forms. Tendencies that formed during this period later became parts of the modernist movement.The Cantos of Ezra Pound, the post-World War I work of T. S. Eliot, prose and plays by Gertrude Stein, were some of the most influential works of the time, though James Joyce's Ulysses is generally considered according to whom? the most important work of the time. The novel ultimately influenced not only more experimental writers, such as Virginia Woolf, but also less experimental writers, such as Hemingway.

The historical avant-garde movements also contributed to the development of experimental literature in the early and middle 20th century. In the Dadaist movement, poet Tristan Tzara employed newspaper clippings and experimental typography in his manifestoes. The futurist author F.T. Marinetti espoused a theory of "words in freedom" across the page, exploding the boundaries of both conventional narrative and the layout of the book itself as shown in his "novel" Zang Tumb Tumb. The writers, poets, and artists associated with the surrealist movement employed a range of unusual techniques to evoke mystical and dream-like states in their poems, novels, and prose works. Examples include the collaboratively written texts Les Champs Magnétiques (by André Breton and Philippe Soupault) and Sorrow for Sorrow, a "dream novel" produced under hypnosis by Robert Desnos.

By the end of the 1930s, the political situation in Europe had made Modernism appear to be an inadequate, aestheticized, even irresponsible response to the dangers of worldwide fascism, and literary experimentalism faded from public view for a period, kept alive through the 1940s only by isolated visionaries like Kenneth Patchen. In the 1950s, the Beat writers can be seen as a reaction against the hidebound quality of both the poetry and prose of its time, and such hovering, near-mystical works as Jack Kerouac's novel Visions of Gerard represented a new formal approach to the standard narrative of that era. American novelists such as John Hawkes started publishing novels in the late 1940s that played with the conventions of narrative.

The spirit of the European avant-gardes would be carried through the post-war generation as well. The poet Isidore Isou formed the Lettrist group, and produced manifestoes, poems, and films that explored the boundaries of the written and spoken word. The OULIPO (in French, Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, or "Workshop of Potential Literature") brought together writers, artists, and mathematicians to explore innovative, combinatoric means of producing texts. Founded by the author Raymond Queneau and mathematician François Le Lionnais, the group included Italo Calvino and Georges Perec. Queneau's Cent Mille Millards de Poèmes uses the physical book itself to proliferate different sonnet combinations, while Perec's novel Life: A User's Manual is based on the Knight's Tour on a chessboard.

The 1960s brought a brief return of the glory days of modernism, and a first grounding of Post-modernism. Publicity owing to an obscenity trial against William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch brought a wide awareness of and admiration for an extreme and uncensored freedom. Burroughs also pioneered a style known as cut-up, where newspapers or typed manuscripts were cut up and rearranged to achieve lines in the text. In the late 1960s, experimental movements became so prominent that even authors considered more conventional such as Bernard Malamud and Norman Mailer exhibited experimental tendencies. Metafiction was an important tendency in this period, exemplified most elaborately in the works of John Barth, Jonathan Bayliss, and Jorge Luis Borges. In 1967 Barth wrote the essay The Literature of Exhaustion, which is sometimes considered a manifesto of postmodernism. A major touchstone of this era was Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, which eventually became a bestseller.

Important authors in the short story form included Donald Barthelme, and, in both short and long forms, Robert Coover and Ronald Sukenick. While in 1968 William H. Gass's novel Willie Masters Lonesome Wife added challenging dimensions to reading as some of the pages are in mirror writing where the text can only be read if a mirror is held in an angle against the page.

Some later well-known experimental writers of the 1970s and 1980s were Italo Calvino, Michael Ondaatje, and Julio Cortázar. Calvino's most famous books are If on a winter's night a traveler, where some chapters depict the reader preparing to read a book titled If on a winter's night a traveler while others form the narrative and Invisible Cities, where Marco Polo explains his travels to Kubla Khan although they are merely accounts of the very city in which they are chatting.Ondaatje's The Collected Works of Billy the Kid uses a scrapbook style to tell its story while Cortázar's Hopscotch can be read with the chapters in any order.

Argentine Julio Cortázar and the naturalized Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, both Latin American writers who have created masterpieces in experimental literature of 20th and 21st century, mixing dreamscapes, journalism, and fiction; regional classics written in Spanish include the Mexican novel "Pedro Paramo" by Juan Rulfo, the Colombian family epic "One Hundred Years of Solitude" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Peruvian political history "The War of the End of the World" by Mario Vargas Llosa, the Puerto Rican Spanglish dramatic dialogue "Yo-Yo Boing!" by Giannina Braschi, and the Cuban revolutionary novel "Paradise" by Lezama Lima.

Contemporary American authors David Foster Wallace, Giannina Braschi, and Rick Moody, combine some of the experimental form-play of the 1960s writers with a more emotionally deflating, irony, and a greater tendency towards accessibility and humor. Wallace's Infinite Jest is a maximalist work describing life at a tennis academy and a rehab facility; digressions often become plotlines, and the book ultimately features over 100 pages of footnotes. Other writers like Nicholson Baker were noted for their minimalism in novels such as The Mezzanine, about a man who rides an escalator for 140 pages. American author Mark Danielewski combined elements of a horror novel with formal academic writing and typographic experimentation in his novel House of Leaves.

Greek author Dimitris Lyacos in combines, in a kind of a modern-day palimpsest, the diary entries of two narrators in a heavily fragmented text, interspersed with excerpts from the biblical Exodus, to recount a journey along which the distinct realities of inner self and outside world gradually merge.

1.2

The 20th Century

In the 1910s, artistic experimentation became a prominent force and various European and American writers began experimenting with the given forms. Tendencies that formed during this period later became parts of the modernist movement.The Cantos of Ezra Pound, the post-World War I work of T. S. Eliot, prose and plays by Gertrude Stein, were some of the most influential works of the time, though James Joyce's Ulysses is generally considered according to whom? the most important work of the time. The novel ultimately influenced not only more experimental writers, such as Virginia Woolf, but also less experimental riters, such as Hemingway.

The historical avant-garde movements also contributed to the development of experimental literature in the early and middle 20th century. In the Dadaist movement, poet Tristan Tzara employed newspaper clippings and experimental typography in his manifestoes. The futurist author F.T. Marinetti espoused a theory of "words in freedom" across the page, exploding the boundaries of both conventional narrative and the layout of the book itself as shown in his "novel" Zang Tumb Tumb. The writers, poets, and artists associated with the surrealist movement employed a range of unusual techniques to evoke mystical and dream-like states in their poems, novels, and prose works. Examples include the collaboratively written texts Les Champs Magnétiques by André Breton and Philippe Soupault and Sorrow for Sorrow, a "dream novel" produced under hypnosis by Robert Desnos.

By the end of the 1930s, the political situation in Europe had made Modernism appear to be an inadequate, aestheticized, even irresponsible response to the dangers of worldwide fascism, and literary experimentalism faded from public view for a period, kept alive through the 1940s only by isolated visionaries like Kenneth Patchen. In the 1950s, the Beat writers can be seen as a reaction against the hidebound quality of both the poetry and prose of its time, and such hovering, near-mystical works as Jack Kerouac's novel Visions of Gerard represented a new formal approach to the standard narrative of that era. American novelists such as John Hawkes started publishing novels in the late 1940s that played with the conventions of narrative.

The spirit of the European avant-gardes would be carried through the post-war generation as well. The poet Isidore Isou formed the Lettrist group, and produced manifestoes, poems, and films that explored the boundaries of the written and spoken word. The OULIPO in French, Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, or "Workshop of Potential Literature" brought together writers, artists, and mathematicians to explore innovative, combinatoric means of producing texts. Founded by the author Raymond Queneau and mathematician François Le Lionnais, the group included Italo Calvino and Georges Perec. Queneau's Cent Mille Millards de Poèmes uses the physical book itself to proliferate different sonnet combinations, while Perec's novel.

The 1960s brought a brief return of the glory days of modernism, and a first grounding of Post-modernism. Publicity owing to an obscenity trial against William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch brought a wide awareness of and admiration for an extreme and uncensored freedom. Burroughs also pioneered a style known as cut-up, where newspapers or typed manuscripts were cut up and rearranged to achieve lines in the text. In the late 1960s, experimental movements became so prominent that even authors considered more conventional such as Bernard Malamud and Norman Mailer exhibited experimental tendencies. Metafiction was an important tendency in this period, exemplified most elaborately in the works of John Barth, Jonathan Bayliss, and Jorge Luis Borges.[citation needed] In 1967 Barth wrote the essay The Literature of Exhaustion, which is sometimes considered a manifesto of postmodernism. A major touchstone of this era was Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, which eventually became a bestseller. Important authors in the short story form included Donald Barthelme, and, in both short and long forms, Robert Coover and Ronald Sukenick. While in 1968 William H. Gass's novel Willie Masters Lonesome Wife added challenging dimensions to reading as some of the pages are in mirror writing where the text can only be read if a mirror is held in an angle against the page.

Some later well-known experimental writers of the 1970s and 1980s were Italo Calvino, Michael Ondaatje, and Julio Cortázar. Calvino's most famous books are If on a winter's night a traveler, where some chapters depict the reader preparing to read a book titled If on a winter's night a traveler while others form the narrative and Invisible Cities, where Marco Polo explains his travels to Kubla Khan although they are merely accounts of the very city in which they are chatting. Ondaatje's The Collected Works of Billy the Kid uses a scrapbook style to tell its story while Cortázar's Hopscotch can be read with the chapters in any order.

Argentine Julio Cortázar and the naturalized Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, both Latin American writers who have created masterpieces in experimental literature of 20th and 21st century, mixing dreamscapes, journalism, and fiction; regional classics written in Spanish include the Mexican novel "Pedro Paramo" by Juan Rulfo, the Colombian family epic "One Hundred Years of Solitude" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Peruvian political history "The War of the End of the World" by Mario Vargas Llosa, the Puerto Rican Spanglish dramatic dialogue "Yo-Yo Boing!" by Giannina Braschi, and the Cuban revolutionary novel "Paradise" by Lezama Lima.

Contemporary American authors David Foster Wallace, Giannina Braschi, and Rick Moody, combine some of the experimental form-play of the 1960s writers with a more emotionally deflating, irony, and a greater tendency towards accessibility and humor. Wallace's Infinite Jest is a maximalist work describing life at a tennis academy and a rehab facility; digressions often become plotlines, and the book ultimately features over 100 pages of footnotes. Other writers like Nicholson Baker were noted for their minimalism in novels such as The Mezzanine, about a man who rides an escalator for 140 pages. American author Mark Danielewski combined elements of a horror novel with formal academic writing and typographic experimentation in his novel House of Leaves.

Greek author Dimitris Lyacos in Z213: Exit combines, in a kind of a modern-day palimpsest, the diary entries of two narrators in a heavily fragmented text, interspersed with excerpts from the biblical Exodus, to recount a journey along which the distinct realities of inner self and outside world gradually merge.

In the early 21st century, many examples of experimental literature reflect the emergence of computers and other digital technologies, some of them actually using the medium on which they are reflecting. Such writing has been variously referred to electronic literature, hypertext, and codework. Others have focused on exploring the plurality of narrative point of views, like the Uruguayan American writer Jorge Majfud in La reina de América and La ciudad de la luna.

1. 
   Chapter II Experimental Novels in American literature
   

1.1. Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov, in full Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, (born April 22, 1899, St. Petersburg, Russia—died July 2, 1977, Montreux, Switzerland), Russian-born American novelist and critic, the foremost of the post-1917 émigré authors. He wrote in both Russian and English, and his best works, including Lolita (1955), feature stylish, intricate literary effects.

Nabokov was born into an old aristocratic family. His father, V.D. Nabokov, was a leader of the pre-Revolutionary liberal Constitutional Democratic Party (Kadets) in Russia and was the author of numerous books and articles on criminal law and politics, among them The Provisional Government (1922), which was one of the primary sources on the downfall of the Kerensky regime. In 1922, after the family had settled in Berlin, the elder Nabokov was assassinated by a reactionary rightist while shielding another man at a public meeting; although his novelist son disclaimed any influence of this event upon his art, the theme of assassination by mistake has figured prominently in Nabokov’s novels. Nabokov’s enormous affection for his father and for the milieu in which he was raised is evident in his autobiography Speak, Memory.

Nabokov published two collections of verse, Poems (1916) and Two Paths (1918), before leaving Russia in 1919. He and his family made their way to England, and he attended Trinity College, Cambridge, on a scholarship provided for the sons of prominent Russians in exile. While at Cambridge he first studied zoology but soon switched to French and Russian literature; he graduated with first-class honours in 1922 and subsequently wrote that his almost effortless attainment of this degree was “one of the very few ‘utilitarian’ sins on my conscience.” While still in England he continued to write poetry, mainly in Russian but also in English, and two collections of his Russian poetry, The Cluster and The Empyrean Path, appeared in 1923. In Nabokov’s mature opinion, these poems were “polished and sterile.”

Novels: The Defense, Lolita, And The Gift

Between 1922 and 1940 Nabokov lived in Germany and France, and, while continuing to write poetry, he experimented with drama and even collaborated on several unproduced motion-picture scenarios. A five-act play written 1923–24, Tragediya gospodina Morna (The Tragedy of Mr. Morn), was published posthumously, first in 1997 in a Russian literary journal and then in 2008 as a stand-alone volume. By 1925 he settled upon prose as his main genre. His first short story had already been published in Berlin in 1924. His first novel, Mashenka (Mary), appeared in 1926. It was avowedly autobiographical and contains descriptions of the young Nabokov’s first serious romance as well as of the Nabokov family estate, both of which are also described in Speak, Memory. Nabokov did not again draw so heavily upon his personal experience as he had in Mashenka until his episodic novel about an émigré professor of Russian in the United States, Pnin (1957), which is to some extent based on his experiences while teaching (1948–58) Russian and European literature at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York.

His second novel, King, Queen, Knave, which appeared in 1928, marked his turn to a highly stylized form that characterized his art thereafter. His chess novel, The Defense, followed two years later and won him recognition as the best of the younger Russian émigré writers. In the next five years he produced four novels and a novella. Of these, Despair and Invitation to a Beheading were his first works of importance and foreshadowed his later fame.

During his years of European emigration, Nabokov lived in a state of happy and continual semipenury. All his Russian novels were published in very small editions in Berlin and Paris. His first two novels had German translations, and the money he obtained for them he used for butterfly-hunting expeditions (he eventually published 18 scientific papers on entomology). But until his best seller Lolita, no book he wrote in Russian or English produced more than a few hundred dollars. During the period in which he wrote his first eight novels, he made his living in Berlin and later in Paris by giving lessons in tennis, Russian, and English and from occasional walk-on parts in films (now forgotten). His wife, the former Véra Evseyevna Slonim, whom he married in 1925, worked as a translator. From the time of the loss of his home in Russia, Nabokov’s only attachment was to what he termed the “unreal estate” of memory and art. He never purchased a house, preferring instead to live in houses rented from other professors on sabbatical leave. Even after great wealth came to him with the success of Lolita and the subsequent interest in his previous work, Nabokov and his family (he and his wife had one son, Dmitri) chose to live (from 1959) in genteelly shabby quarters in a Swiss hotel.

The subject matter of Nabokov’s novels is principally the problem of art itself presented in various figurative disguises. Thus, The Defense seemingly is about chess, Despair about murder, and Invitation to a Beheading a political story, but all three works make statements about art that are central to understanding the book as a whole. The same may be said of his plays, Sobytiye (“The Event”), published in 1938, and The Waltz Invention. The problem of art again appears in Nabokov’s best novel in Russian, The Gift, the story of a young artist’s development in the spectral world of post-World War I Berlin. This novel, with its reliance on literary parody, was a turning point: serious use of parody thereafter became a key device in Nabokov’s art.

Nabokov’s first novels in English, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) and Bend Sinister (1947), do not rank with his best Russian work. Pale Fire (1962), however, a novel consisting of a long poem and a commentary on it by a mad literary pedant, extends and completes Nabokov’s mastery of unorthodox structure, first shown in The Gift and present also in Solus Rex, a Russian novel that began to appear serially in 1940 but was never completed. Lolita (1955), with its antihero, Humbert Humbert, who is possessed by an overpowering desire for very young girls, is yet another of Nabokov’s subtle allegories: love examined in the light of its seeming opposite, lechery, Nabokov’s 17th and longest novel, is a parody of the family chronicle form. All his earlier themes come into play in the novel, and, because the work is a medley of Russian, French, and English, it is his most difficult work. He also wrote a number of short stories and novellas, mostly written in Russian and translated into English.