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new narrative
Eclogues makes me a happy boy this week by drawing my attention back to Narrativity, a San Francisco critical journal (and also for linking to this apple soup recipe, which sounds delicious and is likely be my new-recipe-of-the-week this week).
I've only begun to poke around the Narrativity site: there's a lot there and much of it is heady. But this piece, "Long Note on New Narrative," by Robert Glück, grabbed me right away with its engaging memoirish tone. It's a piece about Bay Area writing in the 70's and 80's, and, most particularly, about how a pair of author/publishers (Glück & Bruce Boone) hammered out a genre within which they could write what they wanted to.
"I wanted the pleasures and politics of the fragment and the pleasures and politics of story, gossip, fable and case history; the randomness of chance and a sense of inevitability; sincerity while using appropriation and pastiche."
Lots of ideas which resonate with me here. For instance:
"We brought gossip and anecdote to our writing because they contain speaker and audience, establish the parameters of community and trumpet their 'unfair' points of view. ... as a collagist I had an infinite field. I could use the lives we endlessly described to each other as 'found material' which complicates storytelling because the material also exists on the same plane as the reader's life. Found materials have a kind of radiance, the truth of the already-known."
The piece provides avenues for further exploration by referencing perhaps a dozen relevant thinkers (both critics and poets) who helped Glück & Boone formulate their conception of "new narrative," and several writers who are practicioners of the form, all of whom are unknown to me.
Further reading: this hypertextual interview with Glück.
Also the newest Imaginary Year entry, on the role of poets in the military-industrial complex.
Enough stalling—time to grade some student drafts. Labels: narrative, recipes, writing |
