Umberto Ecos New Paradigm (original) (raw)
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FROM THE EXPERIMENTAL TO EXPERIMENTALISM
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.
“The Promise of Experimental Writing,” College Literature 46.1 (2019): 1-31.
What promise does experimental writing hold for literary studies now? This special issue of College Literature asks why experimental writing has risen to the forefront of contemporary literary studies in a historical moment defined by reactionary nationalism and populism, weaponized state violence against people of color, the enclosures of digital surveillance, and the ongoing economic and ecological precarity wrought by global capitalism. After all, experimental writing has often been understood-and understood itselfas removed from the everyday concerns of the social world. By now, the epithets are familiar: elitist, esoteric, solipsistic, formalist. The pure commitment to aesthetic experimentation has been seen as an end in itself; the artwork's autonomy from the social world has been understood as the very locus of its critical power. 1 Yet the past decade has witnessed a scholarly reappraisal of the social and cultural relevance of experimental writing. This reappraisal is evident in the notable publication of The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature (Bray et al. 2012) and the inauguration of Wesleyan University Press's annual Best American Experimental Writing anthology in 2014. Moreover, there has been a proliferation of scholarly monographs, articles, and special issues of academic journals focused specifically on the politics of experimental writing-its responsiveness to the
Experimental Writing, Experimental Reading
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
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.
Rev. of Reading Experimental Writing by Georgina Colby
American Literary History, 2022
Reviewed by Shannon Finck, Georgia State University Among the many pleasures experimental or avant-garde writing has to offer, a transformed reading experience is perhaps the most gratifying. For me, the demand that texts marked by their difficulty or inscrutability make on a reader's attention frequently comes with the reward of discovering, and rediscovering anew, the many paths there are to meaning, a lesson I find both inexhaustible and invaluable. This capacity of literary experimentation-that the self-consciously experimental work initiates the patient reader in other ways to know a text besides comprehension-is one guiding premise of Georgina Colby's Reading Experimental Writing. The other locates the politics of formally innovative literatures within the reading cultures they instantiate. Colby and the contributors to this collection contend that as experimental works subvert conventional reading practices, they enable other literacies to shape scholarly and cultural discourse as well as literary tradition. Colby's introduction astutely foregrounds the latter claim, but the collection's greatest triumph lies in its subtler assertion that the pleasure involved in radically reinventing the world through language, for both writer and reader alike, is essential to the political projects advanced in the works here examined.
The routledge companion to experimental literature
Recherche, 2012
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 ...
JUGGLING WITH THE DEBRIS: EXPERIMENTAL WRITING AND FAILURE IN LA FOSSE DE BABEL
Modern Language Review, 2018
La fosse de Babel (1972) is a collaborative volume between André Balthazar, Italo Calvino, Julio Cortázar, Reinhoud d’Haese and Joyce Mansour. It contains lithography and sentences that the readers need to cut and paste in order to play a game. In this article I use this playful cooperation to illustrate a series of tensions in experimental writing in the second half of the twentieth-century, which some critics attribute to the failure of the historical avant-gardes. My contention is that La fosse de Babel performs that failure without that, however, being a cause of despair; on the contrary, it represents a new thriving approach to the creative process in the 1970s.