7/23/2019 Field Writing as Experimental Practice
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The Handbook of
Cretive Wriing
Edited bySteven Earnshaw
MURDOCK LEARNIN RESOURCE ENTERORE FOX UNVERTY
EWBER, OR. 97132
dinurgh University Press{ " t : 1
29
W xpml c
Thlia Field
My husband and I make experimental dinners: we open the cabinets
and reate something om whatever we nd. We never know whats going to
come of it and ofen we don'teven know what to call the results
other than tasty or barely edible It doesnt hurt thatwe have
experience with taditional cing, we know hat to epect with foods or
how
to take a shortcut when needed But when it comes don to it we
enjoy the challenge andsurprse of meetng the kitchen head-on When I
was asked to think about eperimentalwitng, this is what immediately
came to mind
When it comes to witing, I oen wnder if designating somehing
eperimental ismore a public, critical or persoal act? Most attemps
at dening eperimental dead-endinto you know it when you see it
tautologies, or result in descriptive catch-al-isms whereepermental
means non-traditional' Tradition in this context mostly implies
formallyrecognisable ptry and ction oriented toard epiphany,
closure, and a neat nd tidy naturalism where visual details
correlate to psychological ones and the author and characters
are clear and coherent In the opposite coer and equally
generalised, the qualities ofexperimetal witing include witing
which is polysemous, indeterminate, polyphonic,multi-genre,
dumentay, meditative and puts the reader in an unstable
positionvi-a-vithe wks meanin curse these only describe a spectrum,
and most writing eistssomehere in beween these extremes Still,
lists of attrbutes tell us more about the pastthan the present, so
is there a less forensic and more usel way to determine a
literaryexperiment? Are here material dierences beween experiental
and other writing practices in terms of creative press? Lets get
back to this in a inute
Lking historically, there have certainly ben noative aesthetic
traditions againstwhich various eperimental avant-gardes positioned
themselves Saging inovative literature a a critique of dominant at
practice, and by nalogy a critique of dominnt culturerequires ith
that language takes action, tat riting nctions as a privileged
social gest,or mirror In this way the histoy of aesthetic forms can
be read as the dialectical contentof histoy and formal
ev/revolutions as evidence of cultures mutabiliy The reveationhat
no aesthetic atribute is ontologically xed or sanctioned by Go o
King was an eyeopener of the early mode period, leading individual
artists to work ouside the patronage system to display other
knowledges and eperience
Meanwhile, the term experimental wrting emerged om he scientic
work oFrench physiologiss in Scond-Empire Paris he new laborato
science positoe
