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Terrible Engines: A Speculative Turn in Recent Poetry and Fiction

Terrible Engines: A Speculative Turn in Recent Poetry and Fiction Abstract: This article describes the emergence across several genres—poetry, fiction, and the recently coined “conceptual writing”—of a “speculative” subgenre that forgoes conventional literary content in favor of executing highly complex literary forms characterized by a preoccupation with number, the use of word sets, and a high degree of recursion in syntax and narrative structure. To this degree, these works are intent to expose the mathematical properties of language above aspiring to conventional realism and spontaneous expression. Nonetheless, through the frame of the philosophy of Quentin Meillassoux, a form of realism can be discerned in these writings, if only of a highly “speculative” sort that wishes to limn the “unkthinkable” in which a unique form of contingency (as opposed to the classical notion of necessity ) in a primary feature in the apparent coherence and orderliness of our present state of the universe. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Comparative Literature Studies Penn State University Press

Terrible Engines: A Speculative Turn in Recent Poetry and Fiction

Comparative Literature Studies , Volume 51 (1) – Apr 15, 2014

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Publisher
Penn State University Press
Copyright
Copyright © The Pennsylvania State University.
ISSN
1528-4212
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Abstract: This article describes the emergence across several genres—poetry, fiction, and the recently coined “conceptual writing”—of a “speculative” subgenre that forgoes conventional literary content in favor of executing highly complex literary forms characterized by a preoccupation with number, the use of word sets, and a high degree of recursion in syntax and narrative structure. To this degree, these works are intent to expose the mathematical properties of language above aspiring to conventional realism and spontaneous expression. Nonetheless, through the frame of the philosophy of Quentin Meillassoux, a form of realism can be discerned in these writings, if only of a highly “speculative” sort that wishes to limn the “unkthinkable” in which a unique form of contingency (as opposed to the classical notion of necessity ) in a primary feature in the apparent coherence and orderliness of our present state of the universe.

Journal

Comparative Literature StudiesPenn State University Press

Published: Apr 15, 2014

There are no references for this article.