johndoe@gmail.com
MINOR FORMS
While fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and playwriting take up the bulk of real estate in the discipline of creative writing as it stands today, there are many overlooked and marginalized forms that don’t accord with the precepts of these major genres. Some of these minor forms—letters, journals, aphorisms, and reference works, for example—may be unduly neglected. Others, however, embrace their status as “minor literature” and may even self-consciously court failure, such as feuilletons, fragments, marginalia, jokes, doggerel, commonplace books, and latrinalia. Along with examining minor forms in this chapter, we concurrently look at what may be called aesthetic categories, bad taste, and minor feelings. Such constellations of affect are, in large part, constitutive of genre conventions, communities of readers, and the reception of texts. Minor systems of aesthetic value include schlock, punk, trash, kitsch, melodrama, and naïve and outsider art, for example. Many of those just mentioned notably have a basis in class formation. Other aesthetic constellations or sensibilities–camp, kawaī, rasquachismo, gurlesque–arise from marginalized subcultures or identities. Thus, coming to grips with minor forms, we contend, may often require a suspension of the underlying ideological structure that acts as background to the (dominant white/cis/het) “craft” tenets and a recognition of the social forces that covertly shape mainstream artistic values.
● Sianne Ngai, “The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde” from Our Aesthetic Categories
● Cathy Park Hong, “On Minor Feelings:Interview” at Yale Review
● Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, “Rasquachismo: A Chicano Sensibility”
● Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp”
● Lara Glenum, “Welcome to the Gurlesque: The New Grrly, Grotesque, Burlesque Poetics”
● Michael Leong, “Preverbs”
● Kathy Acker, Empire of the Senseless
● Jenny Boully, Book of Beginnings and Endings
● David Auerbach, “The New Dictionary of Received Ideas”
● Noah Purifoy, Joshua Tree Outdoor Museum
● Theodore Roethke, selections from the notebooks,Straw for the Fire
● Yahia Lababidi, “On Stage”
● Chelsea Minnis, Three Poems
● William Blake, Marginalia
● We Want It All: An Anthology of RadicalTrans Poetry, (ed.) Andrea Abi-Karem & Kay Gabriel
