The Book's Dissolution: A Narrative Review of Experimental Literature, from Ulysses to the Electronic Horizons
Year: 2026
Type: review
Abstract: Experimental literature is the book's boundary work: the texts—Joyce's 1922 Ulysses, Stein's 1925 The Making of Americans, Beckett's 1953 L'Innommable, Burroughs's 1959 Naked Lunch, Nabokov's 1962 Pale Fire, Cortázar's 1963 Rayuela, Perec's 1969 La Disparition, Calvino's 1979 Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore, Danielewski's 2000 House of Leaves—that break the novel's conventions to test what a book can be, and the digital extensions that Landow's and Hayles's theories mapped. This article presents a narrative review of the primary literature of that boundary work, through the texts above and Landow's 1992 Hypertext and Coover's 1992 Pinocchio in Venice and Hayles's 2008 Electronic Literature. The synthesis is organized around three themes: the modernist break, in which the novel's narration, grammar, and character were dissolved; the formal games, in which constraint, chance, and structure—Nabokov's apparatus, Cortázar's orders, Perec's missing e—became the works' engines; and the digital extension, in which hypertext and electronic writing relocated the book's boundaries. It is concluded that experimental literature's history is the book's serial self-testing—each experiment a hypothesis about form—and that the electronic era continued the modernist program by other means.
Authors: Revista, Zen, LITERATURE, 10
Institution: Faculdades Guarulhos
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7204636453