Van Praet, Helena
[UCL]
In his article entitled ‘Medium and Mediality in Anne Carson,’ Al Bell points out that Carson’s works—Nox and Autobiography of Red in his analysis—are not merely representational, but also themselves contribute to additional meaning effects that require active engagement with the medium (2022: 1066). In this paper, I seek to build on his analysis by examining how Carson’s Float (2016), as a material carrier of meaning, engages with and extends the thematic issues addressed in the collection. More concretely, I will consider how the material features of the literary work contribute to a specific, felt engagement with knowledge in the collection. To this end, I will primarily draw on Anne-Marie Christin’s theory of screen thinking (2000) and Brian Boyd’s account of cognitive patterning in poetry (2017) to read Float from a visual-textual point of view, where the work’s material instantiation and the words and letters’ visual composition on the page not merely supplement but help determine the work’s meanings. These material effects are directly related to the collection’s thematic engagements with representation, etymology, and meaning. The paper concludes that Float’s material support contributes to the collection’s thematic concept of “anarchitecture” (as derived from the artist Gordon Matta-Clark): by visually exposing the signifying structures in this collection of floating chapbooks, knowledge and meaning are presented as provisional, contextually determined, and embodied by the reader. Float is not merely a work about semiotics but is also configured as a semiotically unstable and modular work. The collection thus materially demonstrates how we can “decreate” (Decreation, 2005) the architecture of our general repertoire of knowledge, inviting a new relationship with the unknown. Works cited Bell, al. “Medium and Mediality in Anne Carson.” Textual Practice, vol. 36, no. 7, 2022, pp. 1050–1070. Boyd, Brian. “Patterns of Thought: Narrative and Verse.” Cognitive Literary Science: Dialogues between Literature and Cognition, edited by Michael Burke and Emily T. Troscianko, Oxford UP, 2017, pp. 93-109. Carson, Anne. Float. Jonathan Cape, 2016. Christin, Anne-Marie. Poétique du blanc : Vide et intervalle dans la civilisation de l’alphabet. Peeters-Vrin, 2000.
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Bibliographic reference |
Van Praet, Helena. Anne Carson’s “Anarchitecture” and the Disrupting Potential of Matter in Float.Anne Carson and the Unknown: Explorations in 21st-Century Experimental Poetry (UCLouvain, du 24/05/2023 au 25/05/2023). |
Permanent URL |
http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/275508 |