Contemporary literary fiction transits immediacy through constricted narratorship and looping present-tense temporality

Evidence

Oceanic prosaicism also defines broad bands of contemporary fiction that aim less at the representation of characters, settings, and events than presencing charisma or voice, especially the sensibility of the single consciousness in moment-to-moment sensation. Often composed in the present tense, or transpiring in a looping temporality heeding neither linear plotting nor substantial time-span, such texts generate a destination-less instantaneity of mesmerizing acuteness, a lassitude picaresque. What seems to be at stake is, then, transitive exchange: the full-throated but fleeting, vivid fervor of nerves resonating from the voice on the page out into the body that holds it. Stagnancy of the narrator’s situation (asleep for a year, say) can enhance this transitivity; social isolation (in a country cottage for a year, say) both relieves the author of representing other people (again, the nausea of made-up people) and scaffolds the book as “big mood.” — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 183

Categorization

• XREF: Core to her catalog of immediacy features (moment-to-moment sensation, present tense, loopy temporality) — directly feeds the reader’s stated goal of naming immediacy’s aesthetic features. Also connects to the Jameson framework on loss of history/deep temporality.
• DEFINE: Names ‘oceanic prosaicism’ and the ‘lassitude picaresque’ as load-bearing terms for the immediacy style.