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I usually see the word “metafiction” applied to works that draw attention to their own devices, their own artificiality, in order to mock novelistic convention and show the impossibility of capturing a reality external to the text or whatever.

Ben Lerner

Anyway I read more contemporary poetry than contemporary fiction so my mind goes first to a kind of crass “conceptualism” that repeats vanguard gestures of the past minus the politics and historical context.
BEN LERNER

Contemporary Fiction Historical Past
The transpersonal is more awe-inspiring, more exciting than the thing we confuse it for.
BEN LERNER

Awe Exciting Inspiring
I wasn’t aware I’d write the novel when I wrote the New Yorker story either. And the narration of their construction in 10:04 is fiction, however flickering.
BEN LERNER

Fiction Story Writing
Maybe that’s the way I’m private – I respect the privacy of “my” characters? Anyway, we’re getting close to the whole “relatability” and “likability” thing.
BEN LERNER

Character Privacy Way
Art has to offer something other than stylized despair.
BEN LERNER

Art Despair Offers
I remember I had this recurring dream that we were playing a night game and instead of eye black we had mashed up the glowing bodies of fireflies and put that under our eyes. So our faces were glowing – a kind of night vision.
BEN LERNER

Dream Eye Firefly
I think the anti-intellectualism of a lot of contemporary fiction is a kind of despairing of literature’s ability to be anything more than perfectly bound blog posts or transcribed sitcoms.
BEN LERNER

Contemporary Fiction Literature Thinking
I have no interest in artists who are purely affirmative, who’ve made a commercialized fetish of the culture’s stupidity.
BEN LERNER

Artist Culture Stupidity
Shaving is a way to start the workday by ritually not cutting your throat when you’ve the chance.
BEN LERNER

Cutting Shaving Way
I’m defending fiction as a human capacity more than as a popular or dying literary genre.
BEN LERNER

Dying Fiction Genre Literary
I like to think – knowing that it’s an enabling fiction – of those moments as fragments from a world to come, a world where price isn’t the only measure of value.
BEN LERNER

Fiction Knowing Thinking
Experiments with the “as if” of fiction are often more lively in poetry and criticism and other modes of writing than in weak short stories or novels.
BEN LERNER

Criticism Fiction Writing
The scare quotes burn off like fog.
BEN LERNER

Burn Fog Quote Scare
I don’t think “I’m going to publish this as fiction” but I think “I’m going to tell this story to a friend” and then I start telling the story in my mind as the experience transpires as a way of pretending it’s already happened.
BEN LERNER

Fiction Mind Thinking
Every relationship can feel saturated by market logic or at best purchased at the price of the immiseration of others.
BEN LERNER

Feels Logic Saturated
When the narrator feels like an octopus, when he says his limbs are starting to multiply, he means he has inklings of orders of perception beyond his individual body.
BEN LERNER

Mean Octopus Order

I usually see the word “metafiction” applied to works that draw attention to their own devices, their own artificiality, in order to mock novelistic convention and show the impossibility of capturing a reality external to the text or whatever.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

I usually see the word “metafiction” applied to works that draw attention to their own devices, their own artificiality, in order to mock novelistic convention and show the impossibility of capturing a reality external to the text or whatever.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Ben Lerner Quotes