/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.11349512]

Does the term "outsider literature" exist? If so what would be some examples of it? Henry Darger comes to mind, but he's more a multi-media lad, who incorporated painting as much as literature.

[Anonymous No.11349547]

>>11349512
codeword for pedos.

[Anonymous No.11349590]

>>11349512
I only know about Darger so I can't help you, but bump for interest.

[Anonymous No.11349593]

>>11349512
It's pretty hard to picture, since in art it means someone who didn't have access to the high art scene, but who the shit doesn't have access to literature? Kids learn to read with stories, their parents tell them stories when they go to bed.

The famous 'outsider art' repurposed kids' book pictures that weren't high art in a way some people thought was, only requiring one weird dude who liked pictures but never chased the art world and got 'corrupted' by its values. In theory you could do the same with forms of verbal communication - high literature emerging out of non literary writing, someone who had only read manuals telling their life story or some shit like that. It's just difficult to imagine the faulty education that would produce that weirdo. What's more likely, and common, is someone who's been 'corrupted' by contact with literature/stories, but just has a very shallow familiarity.

[Anonymous No.11349594]

Has anyone actually read all of Darger's stuff?

[Anonymous No.11349598]

The Outsiders
:^^^^^^^^^^)))))))))))

[Anonymous No.11350023]

I'm not sure how that would work. If you're publishing literature, that seems to indicate that you're trying to communicate with some kind of audience, no matter how small. The outsider art I'm familiar with is generally stuff that's kept private, stuff like notebook doodles or things fueled by obsessions or mental illness.

I have considered whether or not that term could be applied to the last few books that Peter Sotos has written. Between the borderline impenetrable prose and the ultra-personal, extremely singular focus of the writing, I have no idea who he's writing for, but not certain if I buy his assertion that his art is an entirely selfish pursuit.

[Anonymous No.11350219]

Outsider Literature Core:
Nick Smith - The Legend of the Ten Elemental Masters
Tara Gillespie - My Immortal
HHHHHHHHH
Nick Land - Fanged Nounena

[Anonymous No.11350353]

>>11349512
Well, idk about outsider literature, but I know we have something called "transgressive literature" if I aint mistaken, and is stuff that can be disturbing to some
>>11349594
I dont think so, unfortunately

[Anonymous No.11350359]

>>11349512
>If so what would be some examples of it?

Really terrible fan fiction.

[Anonymous No.11350371]

>>11349593
What the fuck are you talking about in your second paragraph, your description doesn't fit the absurd majority of outsider artists.
>>11350353
there's also bizarre fiction

But OP, your best bet is shit like >>11350219
and maybe PKD's exegesis too.

[Anonymous No.11350567]

>>11349512
i'd argue for any self-sustaining genre that exists outside the aegis of the MFA-industrial complex. examples include urban fiction and bonnet rippers. also fanfiction communities really push the envelope sometimes without realizing it

[Anonymous No.11351856]

>>11349512
extremely obscure and mostly or completely unread things posted on the internet

also, these guys sounds like outsiders
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Crew_Inman
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Clare

[Anonymous No.11351870]

>>11349512
i think outsider basically describes people in really insular and painful and perfectly idiosyncratic world views and so i think that some writers are definitely what i would call outsiders

[Anonymous No.11351890]

>>11349512
Like other anons said, the only good example I can think of is Darger. Ive wondered about the possibility of a private press type scene existing like the one vinyl collectors have. Indie zines surged in popularity among young music/art consumers the last few years but I've yet to come across any interesting, longer works, but maybe something like that will be useful soon to finding any outsider lit.

[Anonymous No.11351912]

>tfw ywn read the Jandek novels
I want to die desu

[Anonymous No.11351960]

>>11349594
>>11351890
The trouble with publishing Darger's works is the length of it all, on top of his schizo stream of broken damaged consciousness writing style. It would be a hefty editorial feat that no one wants to bother to do.
Also, his watercolor artworks are tied so deeply to the project that his art could only be done justice through a high quality facsimile printing. Unfortunately that documentary is the best we have right now.

[Anonymous No.11352723]

>>11351912
jandek's lyrics are lucid i think. if his music sounded normal then people wouldn't call him an outsider i don't think. i think that jandek is intelligent and probably less insane than the majority of people. therefore i don't think that jandek's novels would qualify for outsider, at least, by how i think of outsiders, which is having a peculiar kind of insanity.

[Anonymous No.11353255]

Isn't shit like Ted Kazynksi's manifesto outsider lit? Also internet crud like LEFTOPIA and Elliott Roger's My Twisted World. The underground comix scene might count too I guess.

[Anonymous No.11353279]

>>11350359
Off-topic but I really need to know why you used a picture of Kaneshiro for this reply

[Anonymous No.11353527]

>>11349594
arent there a couple of volumes that are completely missing?

[Anonymous No.11353542]

>Kenneth Searight (born Arthur Kenneth Searight) (15 November 1883[1]–28 February 1957) was the creator of the international auxiliary language Sona. His book Sona; an auxiliary neutral language outlines the language's grammar and vocabulary.
>Searight was also the author of six unpublished volumes of erotica, five of which were destroyed by a later owner in a moment of panic.[4] The sixth survives: a 600-page manuscript work called the Paidikion. It was made up of homoerotic stories, a detailed listing of his sexual conquests — the "Paidiology"— and a 137-page verse autobiography entitled "The Furnace".
>Searight was gay.[3] There is some reason to believe that Searight was the model for the hero of Forster's novel Maurice.[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Searight

[Anonymous No.11353546]

>>11349512
There was an essay in bookslut awhile back about why this can't be. I don't remember too much from it but here it is: http://www.bookslut.com/features/2014_11_020974.php

[Anonymous No.11353573]

REI’s works are outsider literature

mundusmillennialis.com
obrerismo.mx

[Anonymous No.11353765]

>>11350219
>HHHHHHHHH

is this what you're talking about here?
http://www.skepticfiles.org/weird/forward.htm

[Anonymous No.11353772]

>>11353765
Nice find but no. It’s an HP fan fiction (in name only) that’s referred to as “Thirty Hs”

[Anonymous No.11353816]

>>11353772
Ah okay. This looks interesting, thank you.

Another big outsider text is "In Sarah, Mencken, Christ and Beethoven There Were Men and Women" by John Barton Wolgamot. It was discovered in a second-hand store in Danville, Illinois by Keith Waldrop.

>Blue cloth binding: four and three-quarter inches tall by seven and three-quarter inches wide. Published in 1944. The right margin is unjustified in away that suggests verse—but it is clearly prose. The first thing one notices, opening the book, is clusters of names—names of men and women, most of them writers, many well known. But then, even more striking, it becomes obvious that each page contains only one sentence, and it is always—except for the names—almost the same sentence.

>I think it is neither prose nor poetry. I believe, from my discussions with Wolgamot, that he regarded each page as a “scene”—as if in a “film storyboard” or as if a “picture” (perhaps a photograph)—representing a grouping of persons, who had “something in common” (the commonness based on the sounds of the names, the “meaning” of the names—what those persons did—and the visual structure of the scene based on the lay-out of the words on the page).

>As he explained the “Hemingway” page, which has John Keats just be-fore Ernest Hemingway, he said Ernest had in it “Urn,” as in “Ode to a Grecian Urn” and that it also had in it “her nest hemming away.” I don’t know what this means, but it has the same sound and meaning structure as the Maugham page.40I think these are examples of what Wolgamot meant when he said to Keith that a certain combination of names caused a “spark.”Imagine doing this for 128 pages and hundreds and hundreds of names.No wonder the book took him twenty years to write. No wonder that Mencken,who was a literary powerhouse in his time (but seems more than boring now) thought that Wolgamot was crazy. Wolgamot was clearly playing to im-mortality for himself and his beloved Sara.

EXAMPLE SENTENCE:

In its very truly great manners of Ludwig van Beethoven very heroically the very cruelly ancestral death of Sara Powell Haardt had very ironically come amongst his very really great men and women to Rafael Sabatini, George Ade, Margaret Storm Jameson, Ford Madox Hueffer, Jean-Jacques Bernard, Louis Bromfield, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche and Helen Brown Norden very titanically.

http://www.ubu.com/historical/wolgamot/wolgamot.pdf

[Anonymous No.11353862]

>>11349547
he was a protector of children