Erase. Whiteout, Ink, Thread and other poetical techniques

This study examines the field of Erasure Poetry from the 1960s to the 2010s with specific focus on intermedial, multimodal, dialogical and iconical aspects. Erasure Poetry results from erasures in earlier works of literature and the text-removing techniques varies between whiteouts, blackouts, cuts, painting, sewing or digital deletions. The explicit aim is to show how visual iconic aspects relate to the erased source texts and how they can be read as dialogical elements. This study also raises questions concerning censorship, literary re-use, book destruction, originality, plagiarism, authorship and metapoetics. The first chapter introduces the field of Erasure Poetry as well as the theoretical framework of the investigation. Chapter two discusses the differences between Visual Poetry and Visual Iconicity and introduces the term Dialogic Iconicity developed in order to specify a dialogical relation between the source texts and visual iconical elements of the erasure poems. Chapter three presents an historical contextualization, starting with the history of the palimpsest and its theoretical aftermath in the 20th century, as well as historical changes of the concept of authorship. Chapter four examines appropriations of Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard from a spatial point of view while chapter five discuss book destruction, censorship and poetic activism from an historical as well as an aestetic point of view. Chapter six analyses intermedial, multimodal and reader interactive aspects of Tom Phillips’ A Humument. Chapter seven discusses dialogical aspects in erasure works by Elisabeth Tonnard, Yedda Morrison and Jen Bervin while chapter eight focus on media transformations and dialogic iconicity in Erasure Poetry in which everything but punctuation has been erased. Chapter eight performes a parallell reading of Jen Bervin’s erasure work The Desert and its source text, The Desert. Further studies in natural appearances by art historian John C. Van Dyke. Finally, in chapter ten, the analytical observations as well as the ramifications of my choice of theoretical framework are summarized. My conclusion also emphasizes the importance of expanded forms of readings when analyzing intermedially and multimodally rich forms of poetry in the expanded field