New Narrative is a movement started in San Francisco in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The writers focus on experimenting with the narrative using fragmented stories, meta-text, and other techniques that are traditionally considered more “poetic.” Writing in the New Narrative movement is known for explicit descriptions of sex and identification with the physicality of the author. The New Narrative movement includes many gay and lesbian authors, and the works were greatly influenced by the AIDS epidemic in the '80s. Writers in the New Narrative movement include Dodie Bellamy

Dodie Bellamy

Dodie Bellamy is an American novelist, nonfiction author, journalist and editor. Her work is frequently associated with that of Dennis Cooper, Kathy Acker, and Eileen Myles...

, Kevin Killian, Bruce Boone, Robert Glück, Sam D'Allesandro, Dennis Cooper

Dennis Cooper

Dennis Cooper is an American novelist, poet, critic, editor and performance artist.-Career:Cooper grew up the son of a wealthy businessman in Arcadia, California. His first forays into literature came early, focusing on imitations of Rimbaud, Verlaine, de Sade, and Baudelaire...

, Kathy Acker

Kathy Acker

Kathy Acker was an American experimental novelist, punk poet, playwright, essayist, postmodernist and sex-positive feminist writer. She was strongly influenced by the Black Mountain School, William S...

, Camille Roy, Steve Abbott, and filmmakers Warren Sonbert

Warren Sonbert

Warren Sonbert was an American experimental filmmaker who worked from the late 1960s until his death in 1995.- Early life :Born in 1947 in Brooklyn, New York, Warren described his childhood as quiet and uneventful. His father ran a chemical company in Brooklyn...

 and James Benning

James Benning (film director)

James Benning is an American filmmaker. He is the son of German immigrants and studied film at the University of Wisconsin–Madison under the tutelage of David Bordwell. Working as an independent filmmaker, Benning's films focus on a sense of place, and are often built from long, unedited takes...

.

Overview

The term "New Narrative" was first coined in Steve Abbott's magazine Soup. The movement was founded by Robert Glück and Bruce Boone, two poets living in San Francisco in the late 1970s as a reaction and growth from the Language poets

Language poets

The Language poets are an avant garde group or tendency in United States poetry that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s...

. The New Narrative writers began to emerge from a workshop held at Small Press Traffic Bookstore by Robert Glück. New Narrative writings strive to combine a representation of the author as theory-based with a representation of the author as a member of a particular identity without alienating any certain demographic of readers.

The Role of the Author

In New Narrative writing, the author acknowledges being a physical being and confronts sexuality directly. This closeness between writing and writer as a body is also achieved by transgressions that appear in many of the New Narrative authors’ works.
Authors create a dialogue between themselves and the readers by directly addressing and engaging the reader in their pieces. The authors also situate themselves in time and space by including pop culture references. Some authors define New Narrative writing by physical space rather than actual writing style, since the movement originated from the physical space in the writing workshops held by Robert Glück in the back of Small Press Bookstore.

Characteristics of New Narrative

The characteristics of New Narrative are determined and explained by members of the movement itself. In her essay "Reading Tour" in Pink Steam, with Kevin Killian">An interview with Kevin Killian
In his piece Long Note on New Narrative, Robert Glück defines the New Narrative movement as writings that possess the following characteristics: awareness of physical space, metatext, poetic strategies applied to prose, creating works out of found material of autobiography

Autobiography

An autobiography is a book about the life of a person, written by that person.-Origin of the term:...

, and "gossip as legitimate art."

New Narrative and Language Poets

In "Long Note on New Narrative," Robert Glück says that Language Poetry seemed very "straight male," and he strove to find a genre that would embrace those of different identities, specifically one affiliated with the gay, lesbian, and feminist writing encompassed in New Narrative. New Narrative authors make "emotions and the experience of the body" and celebrate the idea of experimenting with prose as a community of writers rather than as individuals, two elements that Language Poetry seems to be lacking. To summarize the difference, Dodie Bellamy wrote, "I think of Bob Perelman

Bob Perelman

Bob Perelman is an American poet, critic, editor and teacher. He is often associated with the Language School group of poets. Perelman is Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania.-Life and work:...

's parody of lyric poetry, 'I look out the window and I am deep.' New Narrative, at its worst, would be, 'I have sex and I'm smarter than you.'"
In an interview, Kevin Killian said that the New Narrative authors agreed with the Language Poets' ideas of transforming narrative structure, but they thought language poetry lacked "fun." Also, he claimed that Language Poets were more well-versed in theory.

While Killian states that one of the differences between Language Poets and New Narrative writers is the Language Poets' knowledge of theory, Glück says that the New Narrative has its inspiration in the theorists Georg Lukács

Georg Lukács

György Lukács was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary critic. He is a founder of the tradition of Western Marxism. He contributed the concept of reification to Marxist philosophy and theory and expanded Karl Marx's theory of class consciousness. Lukács' was also an influential literary...

, Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin

Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German-Jewish intellectual, who functioned variously as a literary critic, philosopher, sociologist, translator, radio broadcaster and essayist...

, Louis Althusser

Louis Althusser

Louis Pierre Althusser was a French Marxist philosopher. He was born in Algeria and studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he eventually became Professor of Philosophy....

, and George Bataille.

Publications

Presses that publish New Narrative writing include Hard Press, Serpent's Tail

Serpent's Tail

Serpent's Tail is a British independent publishing firm founded in 1986 by Pete Ayrton. It is notable for its translated works, particularly European crime fiction, and is the British publisher of Elfriede Jelinek and Lionel Shriver...

, Black Star Series, and Semiotext(e)

Semiotext(e)

Semiotext is an American independent publisher. It is widely credited for having introduced so-called "French Theory" to North America through its magazine issues and Foreign Agents series. In 2000, the MIT Press began distributing Semiotext, taking it over from the anarchist publishing collective...

. New Narrative work is also included on Robert Glück's online magazine, Narrativity, and in the published companion Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative, edited by Glück, Gail Scott, Mary Burger and Camille Roy.