History of Experimental Literature
1700s
- Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759) features mockery of narrative, and graphic elements as an all-black page to mourn the death of a character
20th Century
- In the 1910s, artistic experimentation with given forms
- The Cantos of Ezra Pound
- Post-WWI work of T.S. Eliot
- Prose and plays by Gertrude Stein
- James Joyce's Ulysses – stream of consciousness writing
- Virginia Woolf – stream of consciousness writing
Early-Mid
20th Century
- Historical Avant-Garde Movements & the Development of Experimental Literature in the Early and Middle 20th Century
- Dadaist movement - French poet Tristan Tzara employed newspaper clippings and experimental typography in his manifestoes
- Futurist author FT Marinetti espoused a theory of "words in freedom" across the page, exploding the boundaries of both conventional narrative and the layout of the book itself as shown in his "novel" Zang Tumb Tumb
- Writers, poets, and artists of the surrealist movement employed a range of unusual techniques to evoke mystical and dream-like states in their poems, novels, and prose works
- Collaboratively-written texts Les Champs Magnétiques (by André Breton and Philippe Soupault)
- Sorrow for Sorrow, a "dream novel" produced under hypnosis by Robert Desnos
1940s
- Literary Experimentalism Kept Alive Through the 1940s
- By isolated visionaries like Kenneth Patchen
1950s
- Beat Writers
- A reaction against the hidebound quality of both the poetry and prose of its time
- Near-mystical works as Jack Kerouac's novel Visions of Gerard
- Poet Isidore Isou formed the Lettrist group, and produced manifestoes, poems, and films that explored the boundaries of the written and spoken word
- OULIPO (in French, Ouvroir de la littérature potentielle, or "Workshop of Potential Literature") brought together writers, artists, and mathematicians to explore innovative, combinatoric means of producing texts
- Founded by the author Raymond Queneau and mathematician François Le Lionnais, the group included Italo Calvino and Georges Perec
- Queneau's Cent Mille Millards de Poèmes uses the physical book itself to proliferate different sonnet combinations, while Perec's novel Life: A User's Manual is based on the Knight's Tour on a chessboard
1960s
- William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch brought a wide awareness of and admiration for an extreme and uncensored freedom
- Burroughs also pioneered a style known as cut up, where newspapers or typed manuscripts were cut up and rearranged to achieve lines in the text
Late 1960s
- Experimental movements - so prominent even more conventional authors - Bernard Malamud and Norman Mailer exhibited experimental tendencies
- Metafiction: John Barth and Jorge Luis Borges
- Barth essay The Literature of Exhaustion: a manifesto of postmodernism
- Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow
- short story form: Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover and Ronald Sukenick
1970s and 1980s:
- Later Well-Known Experimental Writers of the 1970s and 1980s:
- Italo Calvino, Michael Ondaatje, and Julio Cortázar
- Argentine Julio Cortázar is just one of the many Latin American writers who have created masterpieces in experimental literature of 20th and 21st century, mixing dreamscapes, journalism, and fiction
- Regional classics written in Spanish: the Mexican novel "Pedro Paramo" by Juan Rulfo
- The Colombian family epic "One Hundred Years of Solitude" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- The Peruvian political history "The War of the End of the World" by Mario Vargas Llosa
- The Puerto Rican Spanglish dramatic dialogue "Yo-Yo Boing!" by Giannina Braschi
- The Cuban revolutionary novel "Paradise" by Lezama Lima
Contemporary
- Contemporary American authors
- David Foster Wallace, Giannina Braschi, and Rick Moody, combine experimental form-play of the 1960s writers
- Wallace's Infinite Jest is a maximalist work describing life at a tennis academy and a rehab facility - digressions often become plotlines, and the book ultimately features over 100 pages of footnotes
- Nicholson Baker - noted for minimalism in novels: The Mezzanine, about a man who rides an escalator for 140 pages
- Mark Danielewski combined elements of a horror novel with formal academic writing and typographic experimentation in his novel House of Leaves
Early 21st Century
- Examples of experimental literature reflect the emergence of computers and digital technologies, some actually using the medium on which they are reflecting
- Such writing as been variously referred to electronic literature, hypertext, and codework.
Excerpted and paraphrased from Wikipedia - Experimental Literature.