I'd never read Lish, or thought about the genealogy of "showy disjunction" outside of engaging with Language poetry and New Narrative stuff (whose techniques have I guess been mainstream for a generation--"her uncle invented the room" etc) but yeesh I hate that Delillo paragraph! I don't know what's in or out but yeah parataxis and the poetry/prose of artful gaps between little declarations (by which being a good reader is meant to mean being attuned to how to fill them in, and often so supply the pathos and significance to these apparently lifeless fragments) ought to go... I have tried in the past few years in the essays on Howard, Foote and Sontag especially to work on sentences as big and exciting as theirs, learning especially how Foote imitates Proust and Faulkner--and there seems like disappointingly little discussion in at least what contemporary criticism I see of what authors' sentences are doing and how they could be otherwise...
I don't know about the New Narrative, but I'm pretty sure the Language poets and Lish both got it from reading theory, both on the conceptual level of calling attention to the signifier or whatever and on the formal level of writing (especially prose) in fragments like Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Barthes etc. Then I think there's a longer genealogy back through modernism to Romanticism, Schlegel on the fragment as the ideal unit of literary composition because its very brokenness implies a wholeness that can never actually be created in language. Not that the people who learned to write that way in an MFA program (or by imitating Hemingway in the old days or imitating Didion today) know anything about Schlegel, nor that the distinguished lineage justifies its decadence in the present. I'm with you on the longer sentences!
Right my co-author Taeho has likewise blamed Schlegel's romantic aesthetic of fragmentation through Sebald's American reception for this style... I like when Barthes is being "fragmentary" though!
Yes, Barthes does it well. I think any aesthetic/literary mode can be done well, and can also have a moment where it's needed to overthrow a hegemonic opposite...but the fragmentary *is* hegemonic now, and should itself be overthrown.
Disavowed rude terms in that reality spammer thing nonwithstanding this is pretty spot on “The Dissident Right on X perhaps should have ideally remained a pre-political existential mood, as it mainly seems to be focused around exasperation with the language policing of the left in a childish way in which they lash out by saying slurs and does not have any collective material demands”
Interested to see your review of HL. I don’t especially care because I don’t think either the CIA or Peter Thiel is preventing radical art that would create revolutionary conditions, but with respect to Pogue, if I was talking about a scene of vc- bankrolled reactionary egirls I wouldn’t be going on about how fake “cia modernism” was in comparison!
I think Pogue is right that the MFA style constrained the writer's personality and the expansiveness of the novel, *and* that this development coincided with official anti-communism, but that was the culmination of a longstanding trend in literature (again: Flaubert) and isn't really political. It's just ironic that right-wing egirl fiction is basically still MFA fiction (this is least true of Levy). I saw in one of her many interviews though that her second book—I hope she keeps up this titling convention—might be SF.
Yes, exactly about the mfa side of it. At the risk of being merely vulgarly political it’s the new left again, or at least one of the things that makes them hard to take in hindsight (and maybe did at the time as well) that exuberant denunciation of institutions that one will of course inherit in time.
Also felt it was a peculiar choice of title, but glad it reminded me of this: https://youtu.be/Bj1DZKOeZhI?feature=shared
I'd never read Lish, or thought about the genealogy of "showy disjunction" outside of engaging with Language poetry and New Narrative stuff (whose techniques have I guess been mainstream for a generation--"her uncle invented the room" etc) but yeesh I hate that Delillo paragraph! I don't know what's in or out but yeah parataxis and the poetry/prose of artful gaps between little declarations (by which being a good reader is meant to mean being attuned to how to fill them in, and often so supply the pathos and significance to these apparently lifeless fragments) ought to go... I have tried in the past few years in the essays on Howard, Foote and Sontag especially to work on sentences as big and exciting as theirs, learning especially how Foote imitates Proust and Faulkner--and there seems like disappointingly little discussion in at least what contemporary criticism I see of what authors' sentences are doing and how they could be otherwise...
I don't know about the New Narrative, but I'm pretty sure the Language poets and Lish both got it from reading theory, both on the conceptual level of calling attention to the signifier or whatever and on the formal level of writing (especially prose) in fragments like Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Barthes etc. Then I think there's a longer genealogy back through modernism to Romanticism, Schlegel on the fragment as the ideal unit of literary composition because its very brokenness implies a wholeness that can never actually be created in language. Not that the people who learned to write that way in an MFA program (or by imitating Hemingway in the old days or imitating Didion today) know anything about Schlegel, nor that the distinguished lineage justifies its decadence in the present. I'm with you on the longer sentences!
Right my co-author Taeho has likewise blamed Schlegel's romantic aesthetic of fragmentation through Sebald's American reception for this style... I like when Barthes is being "fragmentary" though!
Yes, Barthes does it well. I think any aesthetic/literary mode can be done well, and can also have a moment where it's needed to overthrow a hegemonic opposite...but the fragmentary *is* hegemonic now, and should itself be overthrown.
Disavowed rude terms in that reality spammer thing nonwithstanding this is pretty spot on “The Dissident Right on X perhaps should have ideally remained a pre-political existential mood, as it mainly seems to be focused around exasperation with the language policing of the left in a childish way in which they lash out by saying slurs and does not have any collective material demands”
Interested to see your review of HL. I don’t especially care because I don’t think either the CIA or Peter Thiel is preventing radical art that would create revolutionary conditions, but with respect to Pogue, if I was talking about a scene of vc- bankrolled reactionary egirls I wouldn’t be going on about how fake “cia modernism” was in comparison!
I think Pogue is right that the MFA style constrained the writer's personality and the expansiveness of the novel, *and* that this development coincided with official anti-communism, but that was the culmination of a longstanding trend in literature (again: Flaubert) and isn't really political. It's just ironic that right-wing egirl fiction is basically still MFA fiction (this is least true of Levy). I saw in one of her many interviews though that her second book—I hope she keeps up this titling convention—might be SF.
Yes, exactly about the mfa side of it. At the risk of being merely vulgarly political it’s the new left again, or at least one of the things that makes them hard to take in hindsight (and maybe did at the time as well) that exuberant denunciation of institutions that one will of course inherit in time.
Yes, I've tried to be a little more honest about my own willingness, if it comes to it, to inherit the institutions!
Fascinating, and wide-ranging discussion.
FWIW, I have quoted her every year on the Feast of Corpus Christi: https://frwah.substack.com/p/corpus-christi-232
Thank you!