What To Do With Writing Now That Literature Is Dead

In which I propose we all try something else now.

Literature is dead. Literature wanted to evolve. Literature didn’t evolve. Literature could still evolve. Literature has the opportunity to evolve. Literature could try to go do something new & interesting for a living. Literature is, after all, free to invent new movements. Literature is, after all, free to commence an explosion of growth. Literature is, after all, alive. Alive, I say! Long live literature.

Generative concepts I have either invented, stolen, extended, altered, &/or produced works from that could spawn literary movements, or maybe genres, or at least forms

• Self-portraiture: compositions used entirely to describe oneself without narrative

• Stochastic compositions: whether constrained by type or other element or not (e.g. sentence type, opening word or phrase, style, something else)

• Language-based compositions, & collections of compositions: see Hazel Smith’s book The Writing Experiment

• Dialogues: whether strictly dialogue or couched in narrative

• Extended prose poetry: as in, prose poetry, but with paragraph breaks or some other element of prose writing layered in to further blur the separation

• Collage: well-established, but in need of more great works

• Hermit crabs: same

• Historical collabs: compositions made by combining original & public-domain text to create collabs between living & dead writers

• Quote essays: essays built entirely from the cited quotes of other writers

• Reframes: the re-contextualization of public domain works by renaming or (perhaps not entirely) revising them, akin to Duchamp’s Fountain (Duchamp was an inevitable inclusion in this post, no?)

• Restylings: rewriting a public domain work in a different style, potentially changing its meaning

• Turnarounds: single-paragraph texts in which a narrator (whether you or a fictitious character) riffs their way from one point of view to its opposite; like a dribble (a 50-word story) or a drabble (a 100-word story), but instead of a word-count constraint, it’s a structural constraint (see the opening graf of this post)

• Lists (like this one) & other text engines: for example, this

Weird books that do weird things, or at least talk about weird things we could be doing

• Autoportrait by Édouard Levé (Dalkey Archive Press, 2012), a self-portrait built of mostly-unrelated declarative sentences

• Works by Édouard Levé (Dalkey Archive Press, 2014), a collection of 500+ descriptions of artistic works Levé, at the time of the writing, had yet to produce, some of which he went on to produce

• Correction (by Gabriel Blackwell (Rescue Press, 2021), a collection of vignette-style reactions to existing stories (called “readymades” by the author, in reference to Marcel Duchamp (Duchamp again!); this is debatable—the pieces are not modifications of existing objects, per se)

• Reality Hunger (Vintage / Penguin Random House, 2011), on collage in writing

• Absence of Clutter by Paul Stephens (MIT Press, 2020), on minimal text as art & literature

• The Writing Experiment by Hazel Smith (Routledge, 2005), on language-based writing, among other things

• Uncreative Writing by Kenneth Goldsmith (Columbia University Press, 2011), on a Conceptual Art version of writing in which text is repurposed & reframed

• School by Ray Levy (FC2 / University of Alabama, 2023), a send-up of creative writing MFA programs, from which Levy is a graduate, in experimental forms

• There are, of course, lots of others. Experimental literature goes back a ways; at some point, everything you know about literature was experimental

I hope to make both of these lists a lot longer.

I hope we all do.