This morning I googled "literary oddities." Among the choices was the following at listserve.com. It was accompanied by an article by Nathaniel Woo. I pared the list to five and edited extensively:
Bizarro Fiction - Described as literature’s equivalent to the cult section at the video store, it delivers fun, low-brow weirdness. The movement began officially in 2005 when three independent publishing companies, Eraserhead Press, Afterbirth Books and Raw Dog Screaming Press, tapped into strong demand. There is an annual convention, BizarroCon. Its fiction might find inspiration from such high-brow names as Franz Kafka, William S. Burroughs, and David Lynch, but the offbeat movement favors fun and silliness over pretentiousness and literary art. Popular titles include Satan Burger, House of Houses. Adolf in Wonderland, You Are Sloth! and Shatnerquake, in which William Shatner is hunted by his past characters.
Oulipo - originated in France in the 1960's, an acronym for “the workshop of potential literature.” It applied constraints to writing in the belief that too much freedom stunted inspiration, while constraints encouraged it. What resulted was techniques generally founded upon mathematical problems and equations such as the “S+7,” which involved replacing a text’s nouns with the seventh noun that follows it in the dictionary.
Ero Guro Nansensu - The name is a Japanese mixture of the English words erotic, grotesque, and nonsense. The movement garnered mainstream popularity in the 1920's and 1930's. Its literature was characterized by sexual obscenity and graphic violence. Its legacy is far-reaching, as many of its conventions are prevalent today in Japanese manga and anime.
Asperger’s Realism - Tao Lin and Marie Calloway, American writers, are credited as founders of the movement, which is characterized by emotionless and somewhat robotic tones of narration and a blurring of fact and fiction, especially in relation to the writers’ personal lives. An example of the form is Calloway’s Adrien Brody, a fictitious affair between the 21-year-old Calloway and the married 40-year-old actor.
Calligram - Invented by French poet and art critic Guillaume Apollinaire in the early 20th century, it composed poetry in which the letters were structured to take the form of an image depicting the work’s meaning or subject matter, such as a horse or the Eiffel Tower. Artists and writers have since created visually impressive calligrams of tremendous detail. Elementary schools have used them to encourage students. There have been calligrams in the likeness of celebrities such as Jimi Hendrix, Freddie Mercury and Audrey Hepburn.
And while on the matter of literary oddities, the other day I came across a blurb that stated there is an 823 word sentence in Victor Hugo's Les Miserables. Believe it or not, there are longer, such as the 1292 sentence in William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! Another that is often cited as the longest ever written is Molly Bloom's soliloquy in the James Joyce's Ulysses, which is 4,391 words. Some argue it does not qualify, as it is simply many sentences without punctuation. Jonathan Coe's The Rotters' Club appears to hold the record at 13,955 words. It was inspired by Bohumil Hrabal's Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age, a Czech novel that consisted of one sentence in Joyce's stream of consciousness style. One edition is 117 pages.
My thanks to the kind folks who bought and donated books today.
Vic's Short Works: http://tinyurl.com/jy55pzc
Vic's 5th Novel: http://tinyurl.com/okxkwh5
Vic's 4th novel: tinyurl.com/bszwlxh
Vic's 3rd Novel: http://tinyurl.com/7e9jty3
Vic's Short Story on Kindle: http://tinyurl.com/k95k3nx
Vic's Short Story Collection: http://www.tiny.cc/Oycgb
Vic's 2nd Novel: http://tiny.cc/0iHLb Kindle: http://tinyurl.com/kx3d3uf
Vic's 1st Novel: http://tinyurl.com/l84h63j
Website: http://vicfortezzaauthor.my-free.website/
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