This is a Blog written by myself, Ian Fenwick, the founder of Write Time Freelance Writers. I want to make this site a valuable resource, not only for my customers old and new, but for all budding writers out there in their lonely realms. I will try to offer any advice or free fiction tips that i find interesting, and I welcome comments and feedback. Please do feel free to contact me about the blog or anything else pertaining to the website. I like to network with people, in particular other writers.
I may also post previously unpublished articles and review on here from time to time. This can sometimes be because i couldn't find a market for them, but usually they're just my own ramblings that were probably never meant to see the light of day!
Enjoy!
Inroduction - Raymond Carver and the Hyperreal Short Story
Posted on Monday Jul 26 12:02:00 BST 2010
Postmodern American literature has endured many definitions and undergone many profound changes. Raymond Carver is only one of a significant number of writeres that have embarked upon a change in direction, instigaed by their dissatisfaction with their contemporaries and predecessors; a change in literary reaction to a Postmodern American Culture.
Bill Buford, editor of the British literary magazine Granta, indentified this breed of writers, including names like: Richard Ford, Jayne Ann Phillips and Tobis Wolff to name a few, and he dumped them all together in an issue called Dirty Realism.
Although the title of the volume is a little unappreciative of the writing, implying a very generic and somwhat thematic connection, he does correctly identify some of their shared characteristics.
He says:
...these strange stories: unadorned, unfurnished, low-rent tragedies about people who watch day-time television, read cheap romances or listen to country and western music. They are waitresses in roadside cafes, cashiers in supermarkets, construction workers, secretaries and unemployed cowboys... They are from Kentucky or Alabama or Oregon, but, mainly they could just about be from anywhere: drifters in a world cluttered with junk food and the oppressive details of modern consumerism... The sentences are stripped of adornment... it is what's not being said - the silences, the elisions, the omissions - that seems to speak most.
