Jenny Offill’s Weather formalizes immediacy as twitter-feed prose in present tense

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. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 168

Categorization

• SEED: A concrete close-reading case — Weather’s short-paragraph present-tense prose as immediacy — usable as an exemplar in an essay on immediacy’s formal signatures.