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What constitutes ‘experiment’. Literary Studies 2 Week 1 lecture 2. The apparition of these faces in the crowd: Petals on a wet, black bough. “Make it new”. This is Ezra Pound’s famous Modernist edict - make something new, or make something old new?. e e cummings.
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What constitutes ‘experiment’ Literary Studies 2Week 1 lecture 2
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:Petals on a wet, black bough.
“Make it new” • This is Ezra Pound’s famous Modernist edict - make something new, or make something old new?
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Hazel Smith, The Writing Experiment …experimental texts usually work against and beyond familiar codes of literary conventions. To write experimentally is to adopt a subversive and transgressive stance to the literary, and to break up generic and linguistic norms.
Break up generic norms • Paul Auster’s detective novel, City of Glass, nothing is ever solved. • Traditionally in the detective genre, the whole point is that someone (a detective, a little old lady, a psychic) solves the crime. • Traditional det. fiction gives us a sense of mastery over our world. Auster does what???
Break up linguistic norms • ee cummings doesn’t capitalise the beginnings of lines, doesn’t adhere to grammar and syntax, is somewhat childish in voice.
The ultimate breaker? • http://www.ubu.com/sound/joyce.html
New context • This is what Pound did with: The apparition of these faces in the crowd:Petals on a wet, black bough. • He based it on the haiku.
New form • http://www.ubu.com/historical/app/app3.html • But http://www.ubu.com/historical/early/early07.html
Rejecting old rules • Dogville - Lars Von Trier - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtRzvS4QE1E • Manifesto - http://www.dogme95.dk/menu/menuset.htm
James Joyce • Breaks stylistic, syntactical and lexical rules • http://www.trentu.ca/faculty/jjoyce/fw-3.htm • http://ubu.artmob.ca/sound/dial_a_poem_poets/nova/Nova-Convention_12_cage.mp3
What are some of the rules? • Narrative - beginning, middle, end; time flows forward; • Language - no mixed metaphors; meaning is carried by words; grammar and syntax essential • Realism - remember it’s only a style!
Hazel Smith, again ‘This formal transgression is significant because it can be a means to rethink social mores…’ But this is to say that form and style are inherently politically significant
Orthodoxy At the same time, experimental work can also develop its own codes and conventions over time, and become part of a tradition of the new… Hazel Smith, The Writing Experiment
The merely odd does not last Samuel Johnson