The future of fiction
Some thirteen years after the Review of Contemporary Fiction posed the question, the American Book Review asks writers about "the future of fiction" (in the forms of "words, sentences, quotes") and then allows some writers further elaborations.
The responses range from polite deflections to all-caps howls of despair, and I'm guessing that many writers would respond with different levels of optimism depending on the particular day on which they were asked the question. (Or, as Charles Bernstein puts it in "State of the Art" [from A Poetics]: "There is of course no state of American poetry, but states, moods, agitations, dissipations, renunciations, depressions, acquiescences, elations, angers, ecstasies....")
I'm certainly in agreement with Jonathan Baumbach's reading that "recent evidence suggests that the most interesting future of fiction will be featured in small independent presses," as well as Vanessa Place's statement that, "[w]hile conceptual poetry has been staking its claims and counter-claims in the avant community for a number of years, conceptual fiction has barely begun." I share Michael Griffith's "hope, not a prediction" that
As I was reading through Haze, Mark Wallace's 2004 book of "essays, poems, prose" yesterday, I lingered on a question he asked, which I'll edit slightly into this statement: "poetry is, ...I believe, the art that allows people access to their own complexity in language, complexity which is elsewhere denied them...."
One of my own hopes for the future of fiction might include fictions that reclaim such linguistic complexities, and a readership eager to reclaim such complexities as well.
The responses range from polite deflections to all-caps howls of despair, and I'm guessing that many writers would respond with different levels of optimism depending on the particular day on which they were asked the question. (Or, as Charles Bernstein puts it in "State of the Art" [from A Poetics]: "There is of course no state of American poetry, but states, moods, agitations, dissipations, renunciations, depressions, acquiescences, elations, angers, ecstasies....")
I'm certainly in agreement with Jonathan Baumbach's reading that "recent evidence suggests that the most interesting future of fiction will be featured in small independent presses," as well as Vanessa Place's statement that, "[w]hile conceptual poetry has been staking its claims and counter-claims in the avant community for a number of years, conceptual fiction has barely begun." I share Michael Griffith's "hope, not a prediction" that
...I’d love to see fiction that concentrates on the things fiction does uniquely well—chief among these the inhabiting of thought, the mapping of consciousness—rather than chasing vainly after more popular art forms.
As I was reading through Haze, Mark Wallace's 2004 book of "essays, poems, prose" yesterday, I lingered on a question he asked, which I'll edit slightly into this statement: "poetry is, ...I believe, the art that allows people access to their own complexity in language, complexity which is elsewhere denied them...."
One of my own hopes for the future of fiction might include fictions that reclaim such linguistic complexities, and a readership eager to reclaim such complexities as well.
Labels: postmodern fiction, reading, writing
posted by Josh at 5:19 PM
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