In search of plotlessness

The Cannibal (1949) – John Hawkes
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“I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme, and having once abandoned these familiar ways of thinking about fiction, totality of vision or structure was really all that remained.”

John Hawkes (born John Clendennin Talbot Burne Hawkes, Jr., August 17, 1925 – May 15, 1998). Born in Stamford, Connecticut he was an avant garde American novelist and a postmodernist, known for the intensity of his work, which suspended the traditional constraints of the narrative.

Educated at Harvard, Hawkes taught at Brown University for thirty years. Though he published his first novel, The Cannibal, in 1949, it was The Lime Twig (1961) that first won him acclaim.

Hawkes died in Providence, Rhode Island. —http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hawkes

See also: American literature – experimental literature – postmodern literature – plotlessness