Experimental Literature Links

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Introduction

This article is a list of links to authors, works, and categories in experimental literature. Its purpose is to give you a starting point for exploring works in this set of genres.

I've based the list's organization on The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature (RCEL), a collection of scholarly essays on the subject.

This project is a work in progress.

How to use this list

If a category is well established in the field, I've linked to its Wikipedia article. If the author of the RCEL article was conducting their own survey of the category, I've listed the authors and works they cover with links to Wikipedia and LibraryThing wherever corresponding pages are available. I've also included links to a work's full text when that's available and links to background information from other sources.

Wikipedia

Wikipedia articles will give you background information on their subject, and they'll usually contain bibliographies that will point you to works related to that subject, such as works in the category or works by the author.

LibraryThing

LibraryThing is a social library catalog website that lets you catalog your collection. Here I'm using it for its recommendation features and its links to other sites.

When you visit a work's LibraryThing page, you can find related works in the "LibraryThing Recommendations" section and the "Member recommendations" section. You can also click on the tags users have assigned to it. Each tag link takes you to a page for that tag, which lists other works that have been assigned it, as well as related tags, subjects, and tagmashes, which are combinations of tags. You can create your own tagmashes.

In the upper right sidebar of a work's LibraryThing page, you'll find links to its corresponding page on other catalog websites, such as Amazon, Google Books, and WorldCat, a shared catalog of physical libraries worldwide. These sites will often let you look through a preview of the book. They'll also give you ways to find other related works, usually by recommendations or subject links on the work's page. If you're logged in, you can edit this section to show links from a long list of other sites.

General

  • Experimental literature [Wikipedia]
  • Bray, Joe, Alison Gibbons, and Brian McHale, eds. The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature. Routledge Companions. London: Routledge, 2015. [LibraryThing]

The historical avant-gardes

Modernist-era experimentalism

Futurism

  • RCEL Chapter 2: "Italian Futurism and Russian Cubo-Futurism" by John White
  • Futurism (literature) [Wikipedia]

Expressionism

  • RCEL Chapter 3: "The poetics of animism: Realism and the fantastic in expressionist literature and film" by Richard Murphy
  • Expressionism [Wikipedia]

Surrealism

  • RCEL Chapter 4: "The surrealist experiments with language" by Peter Stockwell
  • Surrealism [Wikipedia]

Absurdism

  • RCEL Chapter 5: "The literary absurd" by Joanna Gavins
  • Absurdist fiction [Wikipedia]

Postmodernist experimentalism

Postwar experimental poetry

  • RCEL Chapter 6: "Spontaneity and improvisation in postwar experimental poetry" by Benjamin Lee
  • The New American Poetry 1945–1960 [Wikipedia]

The nouveau roman and Tel Quel

  • RCEL Chapter 7: "The nouveau roman and Tel Quel" by Danielle Marx-Scouras
  • Nouveau roman [Wikipedia]
  • Tel Quel [Wikipedia]

Lettrism and situationism

  • RCEL Chapter 8: "Lettrism and situationism" by Tyrus Miller
  • Lettrism [Wikipedia]
  • Situationist International [Wikipedia]

OuLiPo and proceduralism

  • RCEL Chapter 9: "OuLiPo and proceduralism" by Jan Baetens
  • Constrained writing [Wikipedia]
  • Oulipo [Wikipedia]

Metafiction

  • RCEL Chapter 10: "Metafiction" by R. M. Berry
  • Metafiction [Wikipedia]

Postmodern literature

  • RCEL Chapter 11: "Postmodernism and experiment" by Brian McHale
  • Postmodern literature [Wikipedia]

Experiments with identity

Twentieth-century avant-garde women writers

Twentieth-century avant-garde African-American poets

Anglophone postcolonial poetry

The new experimentalism

Avant-Pop

  • RCEL Chapter 15: "Avant-Pop" by Lance Olsen
  • Avant-Pop: Fiction for a Daydream Nation (Black Ice Books) by Larry McCaffery [LibraryThing]
  • After Yesterday's Crash: The Avant-Pop Anthology by Larry McCaffery [LibraryThing]
  • Tomas Alfredson [Wikipedia]
  • Italo Calvino [Wikipedia]
  • David Clark [ELMCIP]
  • Umberto Eco [Wikipedia]
  • Betrayed by Rita Hayworth by Manuel Puig [LibraryThing]
  • Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs [LibraryThing]
  • Lost in the Funhouse by John Barth [LibraryThing]
  • Industrial Poetics: Demo Tracks for a Mobile Culture (Contemp North American Poetry) by Joe Amato [LibraryThing]
  • Kenneth Goldsmith [Wikipedia]
  • Robert Coover [Wikipedia]
  • Angela Carter [Wikipedia]
  • Aimee Bender [Wikipedia]
  • White Noise by Don DeLillo [LibraryThing]
  • Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon [LibraryThing]
  • Mark Z. Danielewski's House of leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski [LibraryThing]
  • Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century by Patrik Ouředník [LibraryThing]
  • Mark Leyner [Wikipedia]
  • Traveling to Utopia: With a Brief History of the Technology by Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries [LibraryThing]

Post-postmodernism

  • RCEL Chapter 16: "Post-postmodernism" by Robert L. McLaughlin
  • Post-postmodernism [Wikipedia]

Globalization and transnationalism

  • RCEL Chapter 17: "Globalization and transnationalism" by Liam Connell
  • Count Zero by William Gibson [LibraryThing]
  • The Fountain at the Centre of the World by Robert Newman [LibraryThing]
  • Tropic of Orange by Karen Tei Yamashita [LibraryThing]
  • Mark Lombardi: Global Networks by Robert Hobbs [LibraryThing]
  • JPod by Douglas Coupland [LibraryThing]
  • Looking for Headless by K. D. [LibraryThing]

Altermodernist fiction

Manifestos and Ars Poetica

  • RCEL Chapter 19: "Manifestos and Ars Poetica" by Laura Winkiel
  • Manifesto [Wikipedia]
  • Ars Poetica (Horace) [Wikipedia]
  • Ars Poetica by Archibald MacLeish [full text]

Post-criticism

  • RCEL Chapter 20: "Post-criticism: Conceptual takes" by Gregory L. Ulmer
  • Heuretics: The Logic of Invention by Gregory L. Ulmer [LibraryThing]

Experiment now: printed matter

Experiments with language

Language poetry

  • RCEL Chapter 21: "The expanded field of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E" by Charles Bernstein
  • Language poets [Wikipedia]

Concrete poetry and prose

  • RCEL Chapter 22: "Concrete poetry and prose" by Joe Bray
  • Concrete poetry [Wikipedia]

Found poetry and "uncreative writing"

  • RCEL Chapter 23: "Found poetry, 'uncreative writing,' and the art of appropriation" by Andrew Epstein
  • Found poetry [Wikipedia]

Words in visual art

  • RCEL Chapter 24: "Words in visual art" by Jessica Prinz

Literary inauthenticity

  • RCEL Chapter 25: "Hoax-poetry and inauthenticity" by Philip Mead
Classical
Modern
Post-hoax

Experiments with narrative and fiction

Unnatural narration

  • RCEL Chapter 26: "Unnatural voices, minds, and narration" by Jan Alber, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Brian Richardson
Impossibly informed narrator
Impossibly confused narrator
  • Molloy by Samuel Beckett [LibraryThing]
  • In the Labyrinth by Alain Robbe-Grillet [LibraryThing]
  • "You Are As Brave As Vincent Van Gogh," Flying to America: 45 More Stories by Donald Barthelme [LibraryThing]
Non-human narrator
  • Kew Gardens by Virginia Woolf [LibraryThing] [Wikipedia]
  • "The House of Asterion," The Aleph and Other Stories by Jorge Luis Borges [LibraryThing] [Wikipedia]
  • "Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot," Tabloid Dreams: Stories by Robert Olen Butler [LibraryThing]
  • Doctor Rat by William Kotzwinkle [LibraryThing]
  • "My Life As a West African Gray Parrot," The Left-Handed Marriage: Stories by Leigh Buchanan Bienen [LibraryThing]
  • Shakespeare's Dog by Leon Rooke [LibraryThing]
  • "The Stowaway," A History of the World in 10½ Chapters by Julian Barnes [LibraryThing]
  • Sweet William: A Memoir of Old Horse by John Hawkes [LibraryThing]
  • Firmin by Sam Savage [LibraryThing]
  • Timbuktu by Paul Auster [LibraryThing]
Dead narrator
Focalization technology
First-person plural
Second-person
Third-person singular impersonal
Third-person plural
Gender-neutral pronouns
Pronouns omitted
  • "Dead Doll Humility" by Kathy Acker, The Making of the American Essay (A New History of the Essay) by John D'Agata [LibraryThing]
Multiple points of view
Merged narrators
Anachronism
Mid-narrative editing

Impossible worlds

  • RCEL Chapter 27: "Impossible worlds" by Marie-Laure Ryan

Experimental life writing

  • RCEL Chapter 28: "Experimental life writing" by Irene Kacandes
Time
Medium
  • The Complete Maus by Art Spiegelman [LibraryThing]
  • The Complete Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi [LibraryThing]
  • Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel [LibraryThing]
  • 1941-45: a teenager's war: Crete, captivity, liberation by Frederick V. Carabott [WorldCat.org]
  • Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje [LibraryThing]
  • Zami: a New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde [LibraryThing]
  • A heartbreaking work of staggering genius by Dave Eggers [LibraryThing]
  • Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life by Amy Krouse Rosenthal [LibraryThing]
  • The Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death in Order by Joan Wickersham [LibraryThing]
The relational
The work's focus
Multiple techniques
  • Daddy's War: Greek American Stories by Irene Kacandes [LibraryThing]

Experimental genre fiction

  • RCEL Chapter 29: "'Rotting time': Genre fiction and the avant-garde" by Elana Gomel
Fantasy
Science fiction
Horror

Experiments with form and design

Graphic narrative

  • RCEL Chapter 30: "Graphic narrative" by Hillary Chute
  • Alternative comics [Wikipedia]

Multimodal literature

  • RCEL Chapter 31: "Multimodal literature and experimentation" by Alison Gibbons
  • Liberature [Wikipedia]

Information design

  • RCEL Chapter 32: "Information design, emergent culture and experimental form in the novel" by Steve Tomasula
  • Exercises in Style by Raymond Queneau [LibraryThing]
  • Double or Nothing by Raymond Federman [LibraryThing]
  • The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation by Peter Norvig [full text]
  • Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century by Patrik Ouředník [LibraryThing]
  • 2666 by Roberto Bolaño [LibraryThing]

Interactive fiction

  • RCEL Chapter 33: "Interactive fiction" by N. Katherine Hayles And Nick Montfort
  • Interactive fiction [Wikipedia]

Experiment now: beyond the page

The digital age

Digital fiction

Code poetry and new-media literature

  • RCEL Chapter 35: "Code poetry and new-media literature" by Steve Tomasula
  • Code poetry [Wikipedia]

Computer gaming

  • RCEL Chapter 36: "Computer gaming" by Astrid Ensslin
  • Art game [Wikipedia]

Virtual autobiography

  • RCEL Chapter 37: "Virtual autobiography: Autographies, interfaces, and avatars" by Amy J. Elias

Planned updates

  • Add links to the empty categories.
  • Add a description for each category.
  • Add authors and works for the categories that only have general links.
  • Add links from other sites.
  • Normalize the reference formatting.