Divergent Trajectories

“Divergent Trajectories does the important work that a selective, medially aware, and conceptually probing print volume can do uniquely: create a context for further discussion that can bring to the fore the kind of writing that has mattered in past eras and that’s going to matter in the long run.” —Joseph Tabbi, author of Cognitive Fictions

“Divergent Trajectories is an important and exciting work, and Chevaillier has achieved a major coup in bringing together these thirteen wide-ranging, deeply informed, and consistently insightful interviews with many of the best writers on the experimental scene today. This book constitutes a fascinating map of the state of contemporary experimental writing and publishing.” —David Banash, author of Steve Tomasula: The Art and Science of New Media Fiction

Divergent Trajectories: Interviews with Innovative Fiction Writers by Flore Chevaillier examines the aesthetic, political, philosophical, and cultural dimensions of contemporary fiction through a series of interviews with some of today’s most cutting-edge fiction writers. New relationships between literature, media culture, and hypertexts have added to modes of experimentation and reshaped the boundaries between literary and pop culture media; visual arts and literature; critical theory and fiction writing; and print and digital texts. This collection of interviews undertakes such experimentations through an intimate glance, allowing readers to learn about each writer’s journey, as well as their aesthetic, political, and personal choices.

Including interviews with R. M. Berry, Debra Di Blasi, Percival Everett, Thalia Field, Renee Gladman, Bhanu Kapil, Lance Olsen, Michael Martone, Carole Maso, Joseph McElroy, Christina Milletti, Alan Singer, and Steve Tomasula, Divergent Trajectories provides a framework that allows innovative authors to discuss in some depth their works, backgrounds, formal research, thematic preferences, genre treatment, aesthetic philosophies, dominant linguistic expressions, cultural trends, and the literary canon. Through an examination of these concepts, writers ask what “traditional” and “innovative” writing is, and most of all, what fiction is today.

Flore Chevaillier is author of The Body of Writing: An Erotics of Contemporary American Fiction (OSU Press, 2013).

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

R.M. Berry
Debra Di Blasi
Percival Everett
Thalia Field
Renee Gladman
Bhanu Kapil
Michael Martone
Carole Maso
Joseph McElroy
Christina Milletti
Lance Olsen
Alan Singer
Steve Tomasula

Afterword

Index