A Series of Experimental Lit Discussions

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We at GlitchLit want to challenge your thinking of conventional literature and in our efforts to do so will be holding a series of short discussions on the topic of experimental literature. Where you take the conversation will determine what we write about in the next journal entry, so take a look at the journal and answer the questions at the end.

A Brief Introduction


A piece of literature can easily be placed into its respective genres and categories upon being read, but when is a piece of writing considered to be 'experimental' and when is it not? This is the fundamental question that has challenged the validity of writing alleged to be experimental. But is experimental literature a definitive genre or style? It seems to lend itself more as a strategy to approaching both the process of writing and interpreting of literature. In any case, it has invaluable resources for any writer to exploit.


Literary genres are not hardwired into our literature; they are fluid and subject to adaptation, change and distortion throughout the years as society, technology and people change. They are also on a spectrum, as Christopher Higgs so excellently puts it for us:

I want to be clear: what I have to say is meant to start conversation not conclude conversation. I hope y’all will see that my intention is to be descriptive rather than prescriptive. In other words, I will strive to identify tendencies, not truisms. I don’t believe in truth, I believe in interpretation. Thus, I do not pretend to be right; I only pretend to have ideas worth talking/thinking about.

I think it ill-advised to consider the forces of order and disorder as binary poles on a literary spectrum. Rather, I like to think of them as haecceities periodically conveying various magnitudes of intensity. In other words, as independent forces that push and pull but never settle at a maximum polarization. This means there’s no such thing as “an experimental text” or “a conventional text,” only texts that tend toward experimentation and texts that tend toward convention.

Christopher Higgs — What is Experimental Literature {pt 1}



The idea of using a 'literary spectrum' in solving the experimental literature debate is an asset that allows us the freedom to define the criteria for experimental work without labeling works as the definitive for experimental or conventional literature. At one end of the spectrum we have conventional text and at the opposite end, we have experimental text, but there are no absolute examples of either.


We still may not know how to answer 'what is experimental literature,' or  'what is conventional literature,' but we now have somewhere to start by identifying what the spectrum itself consists of. So let's establish that.


1. What is conventional literature?

2. What is experimentation in literature?





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Third-Coast's avatar
Poetry, by nature, is language and sign in experimental flux. It isn't prose. It oughtn't to be prose. It isn't a GlitchLit article, or a novel, or a how-to guide, or a text, or a recipe; but it can use instruction, plot, or serve a specific intent to inform or persuade, or use lists as prose does to test the temperature of the language and the human status quo. Poetry, in my perspective, is the crucible through which the human mind creates and evolves and perfects its language and capacity to communicate. It is the cauldron, the melting pot, of humanity's collective and individual psyche, through which we mix and mint the alloys of our thoughts, senses, and experiences and present them to others. Everything can be experiment. Even sonnets, with sensitive measure of syllables and endings, mix in new ways, with new themes and old. Conventional literature deviates and mixes, too, but perhaps seeks more to be consumed and processed as a product for others to understand and therefore appeals to a more commonly understood form, or theme, or introduces ideas with time tested and proven steps. Experimental literature, on the other hand, strangely enough, focuses more on the scientific process. There are hypotheses about communication and language, and they are tested using every possible control or cohort. This, at least, is how I approach some of my poems. I am sometimes just interested in questioning the poetic process for its own sake and less about a making a product for people to read. I can see how this would make poetry as a whole hard to understand if everyone wrote this way. How does one discriminate between Picasso's doodles from his Cubism masterpieces? A sign or symbol can literally be endowed with any metaphor, but eventually enough humans accept and recognize its value and use it to appraise other work (or not, as the case may be), and it becomes endowed with value and used or not used according to that value, whether or not the artist has agreed on it or seen it that way. Anyway, no two poems will ever or should ever be the same. Experimentalism (if we have to come to define it as an ism, which makes me shudder), is discovering answers about the process whereas conventional literature is more product focused and uses some degree of accepted method of communication to communicate an idea or sense with a particular audience in mind. With more symbols and themes and tools to write a poem than there are stars in the sky and humans on Earth, I think the definitive quality between conventional and experimental literature is the intent and the audience.