Immediacy pressures prose fiction toward brevity, present tense, and associative fragments

Evidence

Immediacy discomposes prose fictions. Sustained narration with distant perspective, multiple characters, evental plotting, quoted dialogue, and long paragraphs all come under pressure to reduce, instantify, sharpen. Paradigmatic in this is Jenny Offill’s Weather, a 200-page novel composed entirely of short paragraphs that rarely exceed three sentences and often consist of simply one. Offill’s brevity transpires entirely in the present tense, making the ellipses and imaginary links between paragraphs akin to a whirl of stimuli, the Twitter feed auto-refreshing, quotidian debris accumulating. … The archipelagic associative sentences, the intimate impressions, the Twitter phenomenality, and the circuitous present envelop the reader in immediacy, that oceanic swell of continuity and whirl which is not without ecological overtone. “Of course the world continues to end.” — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 168

Categorization

• XREF: Concrete instance to verify in Offill’s Weather against the reader’s own copy; connects to the anti-mediation thesis of the whole book.
• SEED: The ‘sentence as basic unit of representation under assault’ claim is a concrete anchor for an essay diagnosing Twitter-phenomenality in contemporary prose.