Radical Communication Types in William H. Gass’s "The Tunnel"

Radical communication largely characterizes W. H. Gass’s The Tunnel. The novel incorporates many forms of radical speech and thought, it unfolds a number of radically charged issues of public and private life. It features a multitude of innovative experimental techniques and, in many instances, it demonstrates predominance of language and form over the content. In this paper, we have ascertained that the authenticity and multitude of radical communication forms in the said novel can essentially be grasped in terms of disjointing the Ich-Erzähler’s narrative voice and the authorial one. It has been ascertained that the sincerity in narrative largely governs its radical content while the book’s radical composition and radical language and style form the second set of the radical communication styles in the novel, reflecting Gass’s bent on experimental fiction. In the paper, the following radical communication style varieties have been singled out: “breaking the narrative monotony,” “hate intensifying,” “filial unwillingness to forgive,” “revulsion invoking,” “provoking indecipherability/unreadability,” “accentuated total criticism,” or “downgrading metanarratives,” “ambivalent portrayal of the war and Holocaust,” “pictorial communication style,” “communication style of radically structured composition,” “communication style of verbal adornment,” “embellishment,” “conceit” (as a figure of speech).

Magic Realism and Experimental Fiction

In 1934, Argentinian editor and writer Victoria Ocampo commissioned Jorge Luis Borges the translations of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and Orlando, to be published in 1935 and 1937, respectively, under the auspices of the intellectual circle ‘Sur’ (‘South’). These translations would inspire generations of writers, appealed by Woolf’s subversive strategies to trespass physical and psychological boundaries, and by her innovative conception of time, history, and gender, which anticipated what came to be later known as ‘magic realism’. This essay explores the ways in which Woolf’s influence affects the construction of alternative ontological realms that both coexist with and transcend identifiable historical sites in the work of Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Michèle Roberts, and Jeanette Winterson. The chapter further examines the different strategies these writers use to unsettle received assumptions pertaining to history and to propose alternative rewritings of it in Woolf’s wake.

Helicography

Part art history essay, part experimental fiction, part theoretical manifesto on the politics of equivalence, Helicography examines questions of scale in relation to Robert Smithson’s iconic 1970 artwork Spiral Jetty. In an essay and film made to accompany the earthwork, Smithson invites us to imagine the stone helix of his structure at various orders of magnitude, from microscopic molecules to entire galaxies. Taking up this invitation with an unrelenting and literal enthusiasm, Helicography pursues the implications of such transformations all the way to the limits of logic. If other spirals, from the natural to the man-made, were expanded or condensed to the size of Spiral Jetty, what are the consequences of their physical metamorphoses? What other equivalences follow in turn, and where do their surprising historical, cultural, and mechanical connections lead? This book considers a number of forms in order to find out: the fluid vortices of whirlpools, hurricanes, and galaxies; the delicate shells of snails and the threatening pose of rattlesnakes; prehistoric ferns and the turns of the inner ear; the monstrous jaws of ancient sharks; a baroque finial scroll on a bass viol; a 19th-century watch spring; phonograph discs and spooled film; the largest open-pit mine on the planet. The result is a narrative laboratory for the “science of imaginary solutions” proposed by Alfred Jarry (whose King Ubu also plays a central role in the story told here), a work of fictocriticism blurring form and content, and the story of a single instant in time lost in the deserts of the intermountain west.

Από τον Scriptorem στον Lectorem Ludens

Στην παρούσα διατριβή πραγματοποιήθηκε μια διερεύνηση της πειραματικής πεζογραφίας (experimental fiction) από τη γέννησή της έως σήμερα, καθώς και μια σκιαγράφηση της ποιητικής της, αξιοποιώντας λογοτεχνικές θεωρίες σχετικές τόσο με τον ρόλο του συγγραφέα όσο και με του αναγνώστη. Παρουσιάστηκε, επίσης, η σχέση της πειραματικής πεζογραφίας με άλλα ρεύματα ή είδη της λογοτεχνικής πρωτοπορίας και του μεταμοντερνισμού και προβλήθηκαν οι όψεις του καλλιτεχνικού πειραματισμού σε άλλες τέχνες, όπως η μουσική και ο κινηματογράφος. Αναλύθηκε το ιστορικο-κοινωνικό πλαίσιο μέσα στο οποίο γεννήθηκε η πειραματική λογοτεχνία, για να ανιχνευθεί υπό ποιες συνθήκες δημιουργήθηκε και διευρύνθηκε μέχρι και τη σημερινή της μορφή. Η παρούσα διατριβή περιλαμβάνει τις αναλύσεις δύο σύγχρονων έργων πειραματικής λογοτεχνίας, του S. (2013), των JJ Abrams και Doug Dorst, και του Multiple Choice (2014), του Alejandro Zambra, μέσα από τις οποίες συγκροτήθηκε μια πρώτη ποιητική πειραματικής λογοτεχνίας.

Independence

The Chinese literary field is conventionally divided into two overlapping and mutually sustaining spheres: the ‘official’ and the ‘unofficial’. The former refers to activities sponsored by the state-funded Writers Association and publications by state-owned publishing houses. The latter, sometimes misleadingly designated as ‘underground’, refers to privately funded activities by a self-appointed cultural elite that derives part of its identity from being at odds with the state, and these days also with the market. Since the arrival of the internet, some ‘unofficial’ literary activity has moved online. This chapter describes a fascinating, if extreme, example: the online literary journal Heilan (Black and Blue), run by a group of experimental fiction writers enamoured with the French nouveau roman. It found and explored a unique niche for its uncompromising literary ideas, keeping them alive for much longer than any other ‘unofficial’ group, virtually unnoticed by censors and critics alike.

Late Modernism and the Avant-Garde British Novel

In the decades following the immediately post-war period in Britain, a loose grouping of avant-garde writers that included Alan Burns, Christine Brooke-Rose, B. S. Johnson, and Ann Quin worked against the dominance, as they saw it, of the realist novel of the literary mainstream. Late Modernism and the Avant-Garde British Novel: Oblique Strategies reassesses the experimentalism versus realism debates of the period, and finds a body of work engaged with, rather than merely antagonistic towards, the literary culture it sought to renovate. Charting these engagements, it shows how they have significance not just for our understanding of these decades but also for the broader movement of the novel through the century. Oblique Strategies takes some of the things we tend to say about experimental fiction—how it is unreadable, non-linear, elliptical, errant, plotless—and reimagines these descriptors as historically inscribed tendencies that express the period’s investment in the idea of the accidental. These novels are interested in the fleeting and the fugitive, in discontinuity and shock. The experimental novel cultivates an interest in methods of representation that are oblique; it attempts to conjure the world at an angle, or in the rear-view mirror; by ellipsis or evasion. These concepts—error, indeterminacy, uncertainty, accident—all bear a relation to that which evades or resists interpretation and meaning. Reading experimental literature in this light, Oblique Strategies finds it eloquent about the forms of not-knowing and uncertainty that mark late modernism more broadly.