New Narrative

New Narrative is a movement and theory of experimental writing launched in San Francisco in the late 1970s by Robert Gluck and Bruce Boone. New Narrative strove to represent subjective experience honestly without pretense that a text can be absolutely objective nor its meaning absolutely fluid. Authenticity is paramount in New Narrative, and is possible with a variety of devices, including fragmentation, meta-text, identity politics, explicit descriptions of sex and undisguised identification with the author's physicality, intentionality, interior emotional life and external life circumstances. The New Narrative movement includes many gay and lesbian authors, and the works were greatly influenced by the AIDS epidemic in the '80s. In addition to founders Bruce Boone and Robert Gluck, New Narrative writers include Michael Amnasen, Dodie Bellamy, Kevin Killian, Sam D'Allesandro, Dennis Cooper, Kathy Acker, Bo Huston, Camille Roy, Steve Abbott, Gary Indiana and filmmakers Warren Sonbert.

The term "New Narrative" was first coined in Steve Abbott's magazine Soup. The movement was founded by Robert Glück and Bruce Boone, two poets living in San Francisco in the late 1970s as a reaction and growth from the Language poets. The New Narrative writers began to emerge from a workshop held at Small Press Traffic Bookstore by Robert Glück. New Narrative writings strive to combine a representation of the author as theory-based with a representation of the author as a member of a particular identity without alienating any certain demographic of readers.

In New Narrative writing, the author acknowledges being a physical being and confronts sexuality directly. This closeness between writing and writer as a body is also achieved by transgressions that appear in many of the New Narrative authors’ works. Authors create a dialogue between themselves and the readers by directly addressing and engaging the reader in their pieces. The authors also situate themselves in time and space by including pop culture references. Some authors define New Narrative writing by physical space rather than actual writing style, since the movement originated from the physical space in the writing workshops held by Robert Glück in the back of Small Press Bookstore.

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