New Voice

The End of the Road

At the turn of the twentieth century an eminent chemist announced his belief that physics, and to similar degree science as a whole, had concluded its most significant leaps of discovery. His thesis argued that little else could be contributed to the field of physics that could be as unique and peerless as those that had occurred in the previous three centuries. Indeed, the nineteenth century alone was an explosive era for scientific change. Most of the major branches of the sciences saw particular advancement; however, it was the introduction of whole new fields of study that proved the most celebrated events.

Scientific fields such as palaeontology and archaeology absorbed the most abundant intellects of the period, as intense new discoveries were formed and ever more expansive theories introduced. The period’s advancement was of such a revolutionary pace that some scientists began to envisage the potential for a complete understanding of the natural world, including the laws that govern its existence. It was in this transitional climate of ingenuity that voices became prominent with claims that extreme scientific discovery had come to an end. (continue reading…)

Fiction and Reflection – Part 2

by David O’Connor

     There is great attention to detail in many of the shortest stories.  Often only a paragraph or a page or two in length, these offer meditations on the minutiae of daily life, slowing down lived experience, framing and isolating aspects of that experience.  This technique may be elucidated, perhaps, by looking at “The Mice”, in which the domestic scavengers of the title are unable to find food in the dirty kitchen as there is “something so out of proportion to their experience that they cannot deal with it.”  The mice are overwhelmed by overabundance, incapable of taking it all in, of finding their way amidst such plenitude, just as we cannot process all that surrounds us, the unassimilable superfluity of sensual, emotional and cultural material to which we are (over-) exposed.  (continue reading…)

Fiction and Reflection: Part 1

 by David O’Connor

Lydia Davis had been writing stories for magazines, periodicals and small presses since the mid 1970s when her first book for a major publishing house came out in 1986.  Break it Down comprised of new and less recent stories, and introduced a wider readership (in the USA anyway) to the style she would develop further in subsequent collections: Almost No Memory, Samuel Johnson Is Indignant and Varieties of Disturbance.  Ranging in length from a single line, through paragraph-long meditations, to 20-30 page narratives, these stories, as Dave Eggers put it, in McSweeney’s, “straddle a line between philosophy, poetry and fiction”, rendering such categories “meaningless because her stories just work.”  (continue reading…)