no more wastelands: rejuvenating experimental narrative through new approaches to metaphor, event, and translation.

Southwest/Texas Popular Culture and American Culture Associations (SWTX PCA/ACA)
Annual Conference
(Experimental Writing and Aesthetics)

February 12, 2010

Hyatt Regency Hotel
Albuquerque, NM

Panelists: Janice Lee /  Joe Milazzo / Laura Vena / Jon Wagner

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Abstract:

Experimental writing, increasingly determined by a silent and authorless orthodoxy, valorizes an anti-narrative impulse as the gestural fusion of art and politics. To many, narrative is considered shopworn and meretricious: a too-readily accepted and utterly inadequate guarantor of truth.

But must experimental writers discard narrative and instead focus on alphabetic, phonetic, syntactical, denotative and connotative significations?

The answer is a resounding no—narrative cannot be abandoned. Narrative, as an integral operation in human cognition, has the potential to imagine new and multiple possibilities for how we might relate to the metaphorical, the temporal and the human.

A collaborative investigation into issues of temporality, translation, metaphor, and human consciousness, this panel will attempt to articulate as well as question the underlying assumptions of experimental writing today, especially as they relate to narrative.  Of specific concern is just how literary practitioners’ imaginary relations to innovation and experimentation are predicated on received notions of “the real,” eventfulness and utterance that should themselves be subject to interrogation.