The form of the work is not easy to unpack because it is neither a poem nor a novel, but a hybrid.
This dimension of the imaginary in a literary work like Nox, I conclude, forces us to reconsider the practice of comparative literature as an intermedial practice in an age of digitization.Ĭanadian poet Anne Carson’s novel in verse, Autobiography of Red (1998), traces the development, in Bildungsroman fashion, of the mythical figure of Geryon, a winged red monster. This screening out of presence at once affirms the visuality of textuality in Nox: Carson’s book revolves around the image of a paper- based text. Both effectuate a deferral, or screening-out, of presence. Both hypermediacy and translation, I argue, function as metaphors for the inability of the speaker to represent her deceased brother Michael. It translates every word of Catullus 101 in a separate entry so as to make us aware of the impossibility of a full retrieval of meaning, and ends up making the integral translation entirely illegible. Nox reworks the materiality of an original notebook, yet hides its paper materiality in the very act of displaying it. It conveys this loss through the logic of hypermediacy and a word-for-word translation of Catullus 101. Nox is a book about death and the recording of loss: lost time, a lost brother, and lost presence. This article explores Anne Carson’s Nox (2010) in the light of remediation.
0 kommentar(er)
