Autofiction and the Diary: The Radicalization of Autofiction in Works by Hervé Guibert and Christine Angot

Autofiction has often been viewed as a hybrid of autobiography and the novel. This chapter argues that a new generation of writers who emerged from the 1990s onward drew heavily on the diary instead of autobiography to develop their own innovative autofictional forms and practices. Whereas some critics have argued that the diary is fundamentally attached to truth and resistant to fiction, Hervé Guibert’s Voyage avec deux enfants (“Journey with Two Children,” 1982) and Christine Angot’s Léonore, toujours (“Léonore, Always,” 1993) provide two examples of experimental writing projects where the diary provides the means for new modalities of truth and fiction, allowing the authors to adopt a new relation to their writing and the real world.

L2 Theme development in Discursive and Experimental undergraduate student writing

To complement earlier studies of writing development in the BAWE corpus of successful student writing (Nesi & Gardner 2012; Staples et al. 2016), we examine the Systemic Functional Linguistics notion of Theme as used by L2 writers across first- and third-year and in two distinctive discourse types: persuasive/argumentative Discursive writing of assignments in the soft disciplines and Experimental report writing of assignments in the hard sciences. Theme analysis reveals more substantial differences across the two discourse types than between first- and third-year L2 undergraduate writing. Textual Themes are consistently more frequent than interpersonal Themes, and some variance is found within subcategories of each. Significant differences in lexical density occur across third-year discourse types and between first- and third-year Experimental writing where a predominance of N+N topical Themes is also found. These findings are important as previous research has tended to focus on L1 Discursive writing.

Spectral Streams of Post-Consciousness in Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones (2016)

This article analyses Mike McCormack’s novel Solar Bones (2016) which narrates in a run-on sentence Marcus Conway’s everyday life within the rural context of a 2008 Celtic Tiger Ireland about to collapse. Drawing upon the narratological precepts of experimental writing, especially the use of streams of consciousness, and Derrida’s hauntology, this article argues that McCormack’s novel charts tensions of coherence and collapse in post-Celtic Tiger fiction. The narration takes place within a post- perspective as Marcus’s ghost brings it into existence. The experimentation with streams of post-consciousness and spectrality provides McCormack with valid aesthetic mechanisms to respond in fiction to Celtic Tiger concerns.

Experimental Writing On Recent Mass Shootings

In 2017 the author published a poem about a mass shooting in Orlando where forty-nine people died. Two shootings in March 2021 in Atlanta and Boulder, where eighteen people total were killed, have since garnered national news media attention. But mass shootings are more common than nationally reported. A Wikipedia page, titled “List of Mass Shootings in the United States 2021,” states that there were over one-hundred shootings involving four or more victims in the first three months of this year. The author here uses a compare and contrast list, recent headlines and quotes from news sources, and speculative scenarios to consider again this highly familiar and durable trope in American news.

Effects of Different Finger Grips and Arm Positions on the Performance of Manipulating the Chinese Brush in Chinese Adolescents

This study aimed to investigate the effects of finger grip and wrist position on Chinese calligraphy handwriting (CCH). Thirty participants were recruited in the study and asked to manipulate the Chinese brush using two finger grip methods (three-finger grip and five-finger grip) and two wrist positions (suspended wrist and raised wrist). Three experimental writing tasks were applied to investigate writing stability, agility, and hand–eye coordination, and to evaluate the completion time (s), area of error (cm2), and error times. Subjective responses (arm aching level, ease of grip, exertion level, and comfort) regarding the four combinations of Chinese brush manipulation were measured. The results indicated significantly better performance with the three-finger grip for the stability and agility tests, and with the five-finger grip for the hand–eye coordination task. Using the suspended wrist position for CCH allowed better agility and hand–eye coordination than the raised wrist position. In consideration of the results of the four operational combinations, the three-finger grip with a suspended wrist position demonstrated the best performance in both objective and subjective measurements. It is recommended for application in the early learning stage. These findings can be considered when teaching Chinese brushes for beginners of CCH in schools.

Homo Philosophicus: Reflections on the Nature and Function of Philosophical Thought

The philosopher is a fundamental mode of existence of the human being, yet it is experienced only by a minority, an elite. Those constitute, among themselves, a subspecies of Homo sapiens that is sometimes dubbed Homo philosophicus. Our goal here is to investigate, in depth, the philosophical foundations of this ontological-anthropological concept. We analyze the concept of the philosopher into three basic components: the thinker, the artist, and the mathematician, arguing that the three fundamentally participate in maintaining the operation of the philosopher machine. The following text can be considered a contribution to metaphilosophy, written as a structured opinion piece, encompassing a series of reflections drawn from the writer’s own experience as a philosopher. The mode of the presentation is a mixture of personal and experimental writing styles, intentionally avoiding the rigid form of overtly analytical and argumentative discussions. Although numerous philosophers will be discussed below, four key figures, Nietzsche, Russell, Heidegger, and Guattari, occupy a special position in our overall opinionated view on the nature of philosophy.

The Modernist Screenplay: Experimental Writing for the Silent Film, Alexandra Ksenofontova (2020)

Review of: The Modernist Screenplay: Experimental Writing for the Silent Film, Alexandra Ksenofontova (2020) Cham: Springer International Publishing AG, 249 pp., ISBN 978-3-03050-589-9, h/bk, USD 109.99

Making the Ancestors Proud:

This article incorporates experimental writing which combines interior monologue written in Trinidadian Creole and Standard English. As importantly, the article explores personal experiences and responses to issues of assessment, promotion and tenure in an American university within the larger context of the relevant literature.

All Art is with the Crowd or the Police

Partisan in tone, “All art is with the crowd or the police” draws clear battle lines. This piece of experimental writing collages texts from anti-capitalist activists, corporate news, critical theorists, poets, and press releases to form a quasi-unified voice “from the crowd” that works toward a position against representation. This hybridized voice is juxtaposed with excerpts from a police manual on riot control. The crowd contradicts itself as it grapples with what is possible to produce in struggle; the authoritarian voice of the police outlines methods for containment. Meandering through various events—the blockade, the protest march, the occupation—the conflicted voice weaves together conversations about art, gentrification, violence, whiteness, representation, community, and capitalism. [Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: [email protected] Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2021 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.] KEYWORDS: Gentrification, Riot, Whiteness, Police, Anarchism.

Beginning Again with Modernist Epic

This chapter offers a revisionary account of the emergence of modernist epic through a detailed reading of Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans. In the late-nineteenth-century United States, the prevailing paradigm for narrations of national destiny was Darwinian. Mostly written between 1903 and 1911, Stein’s book opens as if it were in agreement with such narrations of the national story. Stein announces it as a developmental narrative of the United States, tracing two families’ progressions and westward movement, from a first generation of immigrants to their children and then grandchildren. The Making of Americans, however, does not fulfil its developmentalist prospects in any straightforward manner. Rather, the book stalls, digresses, and—to use Stein’s words—“begins again and again.” In its second half, the narrative comes to resemble less the work of nineteenth-century historians, and more the extensive later portions of modernist modern epics by Robert Musil, Marcel Proust, or James Joyce. The chapter describes how Stein’s turn to a digressive open-form narrative corresponds to her shifting interests in biological science and experimental writing. Her work, it argues, marks the advent of new kind of modernist epic, motivated by attempts to find a way to represent national life beyond social Darwinism and its heteropatriarchal protocols.