Perhaps there’s no place better to experience “literature in the expanded field” than in an actual field outside of Lawrence, Kansas. Let me explain.
During autumn 1995 while living in a dormitory in Lublin, Poland, and conducting research for my master’s thesis, I first read Rosalind Krauss’ groundbreaking essay “Sculpture in the Expanded Field.” My work at the time intersected avant-garde aesthetics and twentieth-century history.
More specifically, I was examining the ways in which the Holocaust took place. Not only how such extreme history came about but also how it intensified and made problematic formal questions concerning art, ethics, and the aestheticization of space, especially as a scene of commemoration.
On a practical level I was spending a lot of time in rural Poland visiting former concentration/death camps as well as other memorials during the day and reading books of high-level theory and philosophy in the evening. By that time, Krauss’ essay was already sixteen years old.
For her, the term sculpture had long ago become untethered from its historical use. But the focus of her argument is not necessarily this newer, more open-ended semantic expansion but rather its hidden historicist agenda.
In her analysis, Krauss highlights how art criticism has manipulated categories like sculpture and painting to such an extent that they now can encompass almost anything, demonstrating an extreme elasticity. While this broadening is outwardly justified as a pursuit of avant-garde aesthetics and the ideology of the new, it still, at least covertly, adheres to historicism.
In its attempt to mitigate the unfamiliar, historicism links these newer art forms to an evolutionary progression from past forms, thereby tempering their perceived difference. This process reassures us by framing change as uninterrupted, incremental development. The critic can simply recalibrate the genealogical scale in order to legitimize a work’s status as sculpture. To distill Krauss’ argument to its most succinct dictum: “The new is made comfortable by being made familiar….”
I have written about John Trefry’s Plats before and how I understand his, and its, literary project. And to be entirely transparent, I consider John a friend. I attended the recent Tenth Anniversary of Inside the Castle as much to hang out with him as to take part in a celebration of a publisher.
Yet what I find most exciting and revitalizing about Inside the Castle is its utter disinterest in historicization, especially as a venture in self-mythologization. John and the roster of Inside the Castle writers could, for the most part, simply profess to be but the latest exemplars of a literary series extending back through Maurice Blanchot, Samuel Beckett, Michel Butor, and Georges Perec, to name but a few. They could quite easily make the paternity case that they are the bastard children of William S. Burroughs, who had spent the last sixteen years of his life in nearby Lawrence.
And with its compilation and cataloging of lists, genealogies, and the enumeration of laws, immersive narrative through accumulation, the de-emphasis on conventional narrative, and the use of tabulation to convey meaning, the Inside the Castle authors could even go so far as to claim the Bible itself as their foremost antecedent.
Though I won’t be around to read them, I do look forward to those dissertations that will be written fifty years from now.
One of the great ironies of John Trefry’s literary project is that despite the assumed interiority (Inside the Castle, after all) it nonetheless stretches still beyond the boundaries of literature as such, particularly of much contemporary neorealist writing. It reminds me of one of those late-1980s self-help platitudes: you have to go in to find out.
Just as Krauss identified the expanded field of sculpture as a realm where new forms and meanings could emerge, where the new is not merely an extension of the old but a realm of pure potential. By not relying on a claim to lineage or pedigree, Inside the Castle honors its radical retreat from narrative and from historical continuity. This ballsy stance fosters a literary community that foregrounds innovation over inheritance, experimentation over emulation.
Experiencing literature like we did over that weekend in late May 2024 in an actual field outside of Lawrence is a fitting metaphor for this expansion. It situates the reader, the audience, in an open space where the constraints of walls and conventional forms dissolve into a vast, unbounded world of possibility.
Writer and translator Frank Garrett shops in Dallas, Texas, and is essays editor at Minor Literature[s]. His series Better Shopping Through Living will appear (mostly) monthly. He has been inside the Castle.
minor literature[s] 