Exhausted Replenishment: Experimental Fiction and the Decomposition of Literature
Exhausted Replenishment: Experimental Fiction and the Decomposition of Literature

Summary/Abstract: This paper provides a series of reflections on experimental fiction and the decomposition of literature through selective close reference to work by the American writer Lydia Davis. Incidental reference is also made to digital culture, as well as to the work of Edgar Allan Poe, Jorge Luis Borges, John Williams and Jim Crace, these last two being particularly crucial in cueing the essay’s conclusion on the congruence between the act of experiment and acts of literature. The essay first considers the plausibility of the kind of critical narrative that recounts literature’s supposed precariousness within contemporary culture, moving on to consider the difficulties posed by routines of postmodernist commentary that are themselves, arguably, a little sclerotic. The suggestion, then, is that the “literature of replenishment” may itself be spent in its attempts to revive the “literature of exhaustion”, and that this enervation affects literary criticism too. The paper then focuses on four short stories by Lydia Davis, chosen because their experiments with brevity and grammar prompt findings that seem to give the lie to the idea that literature’s resources for self-renewal are exhausted. The Conclusion reflects on perceptions of terminality in literature and literary criticism and considers their tenability in the present.

• Details
• Contents