Status Updates From Experimental Fiction Now

“That the purport of [Lethem’s] themes don’t go much beyond surface satire is in its favour, as we aren’t subjected to...the tedium the exploration of “ideas” in fiction usually entails.” A limiting view of innovation/exploration/new ways of seeing the old. The ‘novel of ideas’ de-emphasises character (let alone plot), which Green acknowledges as motive for writers attempting to push the envelope.

We all inhabit such language-worlds, ways or thinking that determine our interaction with the “outside” world, except that, caught as we are in these linguistic and syntactical webs, there really is no outside....such webs...blanch our words of most of their vigor, leaving on edgeless, etiolated husks.

metafiction and postmodernism are not synonymous [the former] has its roots in the fiction of Beckett and Borges, or...to trace it to its earliest manifestations in fiction, Cervantes and Laurence Sterne.

Realism in any form thwarted by the introduction of metafiction, but Green discards Joyce et al (disruptors who failed to dislodge realism).

Nice (useful) discussion - agreement - that experimental is a term that is somewhat loaded. Adventurous or innovative has a broader appeal - precisely because "experiment" is hypothesis testing. Ars is performance - not a dress rehearsal.