Article: Ben Marcus, The Age of Wire and String.

Abstract

This article aims to show that Ben Marcus's first novel The Age of Wire and String is a formal experiment in language. The relationship with the outside world is changed in a radical way and the text can be seen as a book of instructions for life: a grammar of emotion, instinct, and pain. The lyrical prose makes extreme demands on the reader to perform a decoding exercise, but he is blocked by the constant redefinitions of concepts, relationships, and places. In creating the world of an imaginary American society, Marcus perceives everything outside as animate, and gives a voice to its loss.

First published in America in 1995 (Knopf) and ...

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