[citation needed] But in its mockery of narrative, and its willingness to use such graphic elements, such as an all-black page to mourn the death of a character, Sterne's novel is considered a fundamental text for many post-World War II authors.
By the end of the 1930s, the political situation in Europe had made Modernism appear to be an inadequate, aestheticized, even irresponsible response to the danger of worldwide fascism, and literary experimentalism faded from public view, kept alive through the 1940s only by isolated visionaries like Kenneth Patchen.
In the 1950s, the Beat writers can be seen as a reaction against the hidebound quality of both the poetry and prose of its time, and such hovering, near-mystical works as Jack Kerouac's novel Visions of Gerard represented a new formal approach to the standard narrative of that era.
The OULIPO (in French, Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, or "Workshop of Potential Literature") brought together writers, artists, and mathematicians to explore innovative, combinatoric means of producing texts.
Queneau's Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes uses the physical book itself to proliferate different sonnet combinations, while Perec's novel Life: A User's Manual is based on the Knight's Tour on a chessboard.
Argentine Julio Cortázar and the naturalized Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, both Latin American writers who have created masterpieces in experimental literature of 20th and 21st century, mixing dreamscapes, journalism, and fiction; regional classics written in Spanish include the Mexican novel "Pedro Paramo" by Juan Rulfo, the Colombian family epic "One Hundred Years of Solitude" by Gabriel García Márquez, the Peruvian political history "The War of the End of the World" by Mario Vargas Llosa, the Puerto Rican Spanglish dramatic dialogue "Yo-Yo Boing!"
[6] Contemporary American authors David Foster Wallace, Giannina Braschi, and Rick Moody, combine some of the experimental form-play of the 1960s writers with a more emotionally deflating, irony, and a greater tendency towards accessibility and humor.
Wallace's Infinite Jest is a post-postmodern maximalist work describing life at a tennis academy and a rehab facility; digressions often become plotlines, and the book features over 100 pages of footnotes.
Terena Elizabeth Bell's 2022 short story "#CoronaLife" (from Tell Me What You See) is written as seen from the main character's phone, using emoji and emoticon, moveable gifs,[8] hyperlinks,[9] and memes,[10] as well as depicting email, text,[10][9] Twitter posts,[9] missed call notifications,[10] and other media commonly viewed on smartphones.
In a different vein, Greek author Dimitris Lyacos suppresses the urge of taxonomizing the text by creating multi-genre narratives, a process he likens to John Keats' negative capability.
[11] In Z213: Exit he combines, in a kind of a modern-day palimpsest, the diary entries of two narrators in a heavily fragmented text, interspersed with excerpts from the biblical Exodus, to recount a journey along which the distinct realities of inner self and outside world gradually merge.