Raymond Roussel
Perhaps the most brilliant and original pure formalist ever.
William H Gass
A master of syntax, extremely sympathetic to the innate eros of language.
Joshua Cohen
Building on the tradition erected by those like Gass and Barth, a contemporary master of form, a still young and promising writer who I admire immensely.
Maurice Blanchot
As thinkers such as Derrida and Foucault have aptly observed, Blanchot (building on the work of Kafka) took the question of writing itself, in its most high falutin, ambitious sense, to its absolute limits.
Witold Gombrowicz
A successor to Kafka (like Blanchot), but with an absolutely delightful, ribald sense of humor that always seems to be escaping at the seams. Humor is important! Attempting to straddle various cultural contexts without settling into any particular nook (academia, the art world, the various underworlds and demimondes of the avant-garde), my goal as an artist and writer has always been to attempt to understand culture as a whole, which seems to lead me in the direction of an intense formalism which nevertheless embraces the possibility of political and ideological commitment (although as a Nietzschean I feel that irony must be the watchword of culture and a barrier against various forms of fanaticism).
James Krefeld-Clark has a bachelors degree in comparative literature from Princeton University and intend to continue to pursue a PhD in that discipline. Meanwhile he is doing my best to make mischief wherever and whenever I can.