Appearing Beside Text

Appearing beside Text introduces how the negative space between print can appear as another type of text. If indeed text is anything with a sense of materiality and a sense of meaning, then underlying pages may also join the textual surface when visibly materializing for our reflection. It is a transformation which involves perceiving not only different materials but conflicting senses of each material. That arising level of play has been outlawed by common-sense theory, given that blank pages have epitomized what is most repressed or radically excluded from representation. But frameworks based on such absolute alterity are gradually exited when paginal bodies come to appear both outside and inside the work of art. This transition into aesthetics, along with the political and historical implications, are mapped across post-1945 American poetry, through poems and prose, novels and nonfiction, by poets as diverse as Charles Olson, Susan Howe, H.D., Rosmarie Waldrop, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Barbara Guest, Ronald Johnson, and Claudia Rankine.

Joseph Shafer teaches American Studies at the University of Marburg, Germany, and publishes on poetry, critical theory, and aesthetics. He has also edited Meditations: The Assorted Prose of Barbara Guest and co-edited a new Selected Poems of Barbara Guest.