LITERATURE AND EXPERIMENT

Literature and Experiment was the title of a senior colloquium taken by ten students as a capstone course for their English major at the University of Hong Kong in 2015-16. As a new type of course, the colloquium itself was something of an experiment, with its content and format largely determined by the students themselves. We began by reading selections from The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature and discussing ways in which writing questions the very definition of literature, probes its limits and explores the consequences of transgressing them. Looking back over their studies, the participants in the colloquium then selected representative texts to discuss the risks and motives of experimentation in literature, the implications of challenging readers’ expectations of coherence and readability, the possibility of writing without conventions, and the compatibility of experimentation and popularity. The essays gathered here, focusing on late nineteenth-century novels (Zola, Wilde), modernist writing (Woolf, Pound, Faulkner, Camus) and postmodernist fiction (Jackson, Coupland, Mitchell, Murakami), not only highlight the importance of experimentation in modern and contemporary literature but try to demonstrate the critical value of looking for the experimental in texts that have become classics of our time. We hope the essays will inspire you to reread these texts and to continue to explore the experimental dimension of your favourite literature.

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Otto Heim
School of English
The University of Hong Kong
June 2016