The Experimental Gothic

This essay proposes that the crucial movements of the historical avant-garde looked to the first wave of Gothic literature (1760s–1820s) in developing their respective variants of experimental prose. To date, the linguistic and textual characteristics (non-mimesis, ineffability) of the literary mode here called Experimental Gothic have not been comprehensively investigated, neither in Avant-Garde nor Gothic Studies. The proposed poetics of the Experimental Gothic indicates that the early avant-gardes did not straightforwardly recycle Gothic material but rather wove the praxis of contemporary theories of representation into their prosaic exploits, which were immersed in the imaginary, supernatural and irrational. The linguistic features of recognised works of avant-garde prose by luminaries such as Carl Einstein, Hugo Ball and Julien Gracq reveal the Experimental Gothic to be a language project spawned from anarchist backgrounds, which leads readers to reject their naïve belief in conventional representation in order to gain a renewed sense of reality.

Abraham Sutzkever

Abraham Sutzkever (Yiddish: Avrom Sutskever; Hebrew: Avraham Sutskever) (b. 1913–d. 2010) was a titan of Yiddish literature. Over the course of six decades, he published more than thirty volumes of poetry and prose. He also edited the most important postwar Yiddish journal of arts and letters, Di goldene keyt, from 1949 to 1995. From his youth in Vilna and Siberia to his later years in Tel Aviv, Sutzkever insistently posited the power of poetry to sustain life and culture. His wartime experiences further marked the writer as both poet and hero. During his incarceration in the Vilna Ghetto, he served as a member of the “Paper Brigade,” rescuing the cultural heritage of the Jewish community of the “Jerusalem of Lithuania.” He also took up arms as a partisan fighter in the forests surrounding the city. After the war, he testified in graphic detail at the Nuremberg Tribunals at the request of the Soviet Union. A writer of wide-ranging interests—from the frozen tundra of Omsk to the cafés of Paris, from the cellars of the Vilna Ghetto to the shores of the Red Sea—Sutzkever continually exercised his neologistic skills, poeticizing his present life in conversation with the memories of his past and his cultural ambitions for the future. Some of his most prominent volumes include his first collection, Lider (Poems), published in Warsaw in 1937; his epic poem Sibir (Siberia), illustrated by Marc Chagall and published in Jerusalem in 1953; the series of experimental prose poems of memorialization, Griner akvaryum (Green Aquarium), published in Jerusalem in 1975; and one of his later volumes, Lider fun togbukh (Poems from a Diary), published in Tel Aviv in 1977.

‘The wish to paint’: Bowen and the Visual Arts

Throughout her life, Elizabeth Bowen maintained a rich network of artist friends and acquaintances. She often attended exhibitions and was an astute, sometimes caustic critic in letters as well as reviews. Her short tenure as an art student is an often mentioned but rarely, if ever, explored biographical fact, yet it was a key moment in her creative development. It is perhaps unsurprising then that she began to write while ‘still under the influence of … the wish to paint.’ This essay considers Bowen's significant relationship with the visual arts, from her art training and networks to her critical engagement and deeply visual prose. In childhood, Bowen was taught to paint by Elizabeth Yeats and forged a lasting friendship with Mainie Jellett, one of Ireland's great modernists. In 1918, Bowen enrolled at the LCC Central School of Arts and Crafts but, convinced she lacked the requisite artistic talent, she withdrew from her studies after only two terms. This sense of failure plunged her into an artistic crisis from which writing offered a creative way forward. Tellingly, Bowen later reflected that her earliest stories ‘had the character of a last hope’. In describing the best of her writing as ‘verbal painting’, Bowen offers us a lens through which to conceptualise the dynamic dialogue between her more experimental prose and visual modernism. Drawing together aspects of her artistic formation, milieu, and taste, this essay ultimately seeks to provide a series of layered contexts to enrich our understanding of Bowen's fictions, including The Last September (1929) and To the North (1932).

Michel Butor’s “Improvisations sur Rimbaud”: interpretation of the poet’s works and language

This article discusses one relatively unknown aspect of the French writer and philosopher, Michel Butor’s works — his literary criticism through the example of “Improvisations sur Rimbaud”. Poet’s works are investigated by Butor unattainable apart from the stages of his life, and the most significant poems — in the context of the epistolary heritage of Rimbaud. Most attention is paid to the chapter “Improvisations”, dedicated to the collection of Rimbaud’s “Illuminations”: to the development of the theme of the city and its transformation, the role of structural rhyme and reprise at the beginning of the line overturning the classical system of versification, the appearance in the texts of Rimbaud mathematical structure. The new poetic language, the innovative artistic techniques of the poet , which are used in the composition of a number of texts in the collection, comprehensively explored by Butor, had an undeniable influence on the direction of the research for new literary forms in the works of Butor: his novel “Degrès”, which uses the numerical structure as a method of total description of reality as well as a number of texts written in the genre of experimental prose in which fragmentation is elevated to an aesthetic principle, the idea of synthesizing the arts is implemented and endless intertextual interactions are created.

Affekte in Bewegung

This article examines the relationship between language, space, and movement in Ann Quin’s novel ‚Passages‘ (1969) from an affect-oriented theoretical perspective. After a brief overview of the relevant theoretical background, it analyses the literary techniques Quin uses to explore affective interrelations that defy common strategies of literary representation. By drawing attention to Quin’s engagement with the writings of Virginia Woolf, the article also reveals the underestimated importance of Woolf as a point of reference for understanding Quin’s experimental prose.

Creative Writing Crosses the Atlantic: An Attempt at Creating a Minor French Literature

This chapter analyzes literary advice culture from a transnational-comparative perspective. It sheds light on the reception of the American poetics of creative writing in contemporary France by examining the specific case of Outils du roman: Avec Malt Olbren sur les pistes et exercices du creative writing à l’américaine (2016, Tools of the Novel. Exploring American Creative Writing with Malt Olbren) by the experimental prose-writer François Bon. This text represents a broader dynamic in which French authors of literary advice resort to a repertoire of American writing techniques in an attempt to revive French literature. To conceptualize this process of transfer, I use Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “minor literature.” This notion conveys how literary advice in France must constantly position itself vis-à-vis its American counterpart, but also how it appropriates and transforms this same body of ideas and techniques. More generally, this chapter makes a case for an increased consideration of supranational transfers in the domain of literary advice when studying processes of local literary change.

Lethal in Two Languages

This chapter explores the parallels and disjunctions between Máirtín Ó Cadhain and Flann O’Brien, with particular reference to the extent to which formal experiment in both writers owes as much to the specific circumstances of Irish culture, politics, and language in the middle decades of the twentieth century as it does to European modernism and postmodernism. The chapter examines the centrality of both writers’ detailed knowledge of the Irish language and its narrative traditions to their experimental prose fictions. The chapter argues that Ó Cadhain’s insight into lives blighted by economic injustice and bureaucratic tyranny has lost little of its political urgency in the half-century since his death, while Ó Nualláin’s work continues to deride a world in which absurdity insists on being taken seriously and the distortion of language is a defining attribute of power.

PATTERNS OF RENAISSANCE EPISTOLOGRAPHY IN THE EXPERIMENTAL PROSE OF ALEXANDER ILYANEN

The online prose of Alexander Ilyanen, recognized as one of the most significant experiments of Russian literature today, is not only a reflection on the possibilities of writing and utterance, but also an experience of rewriting of written forms. Recent prose of Ilyanen is a kind of philological observation of the usability of different types of writing to assemble a meaningful statement about the current quarantine situation. Correlation of these types of writing with the usual genres is not relevant, even introducing general framework of the novel and drama. Renaissance Italian epistolography as a way of producing situations, rather than roman à clef, clarifies Ilyanen’s prose strategies. A detailed analysis of the Renaissance letters by Poggio proves that he did not affirm the new model of language use, reviving the Cicero ideal, but he controlled effects of writing and biography, to improve official policy. The irony, intrigues, hints, social designing in these letters anticipate the tactics of professional blogging by eminent writers, but differ in responsibility for political decisions of both authors and persons mentioned.