Special Focus: "Omission", edited by Patrick Gill

Throughout literary history and in many cultures, we encounter an astute use of conspicuous absences to conjure an imagined reality into a recipient’s mind. The term ‘omission’ as used in the present study, then, demarcates a common artistic phenomenon: a silence, blank, or absence, introduced against the recipient’s generic or experiential expectations, but which nonetheless frequently encapsulates the tenor of the work as a whole. Such omissions can be employed for their affective potential, when emotions represented or evoked by the text are deemed to be beyond words. They can be employed to raise epistemological questions, as when an omission marks the limits of what can be known. Ethical questions can also be approached by means of omissions, as when a character’s voice is omitted, for instance. Finally, omission always carries within it the potential to reflect on the media and genres on which it is brought to bear: as its efficacy depends on the recipient’s generic expectations, omission is frequently characterized by a high degree of meta-discursiveness. This volume investigates the various strategies with which the phenomenon of omission is employed across a range of textual forms and in different cultures to conclusively argue for its status as a highly effective and near-universal form of artistic signification.

• Foreword from the Editors 6
• Contents 8
• Special Focus: Omission 10
• Introduction: Omission 10
• “[B]y the Knowledge of the Great Saint Paraleipomenon—”: Si(g)ns of Omission in Laurence Sterne 22
• When Words Stop: Omission in Songs 42
• Omissions, Blanks, and Silences: Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnet 126 58
• Blackness as Disability: Compulsory Whiteness, Able-Bodiedness, and Masculinity in Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy 76
• Girls’ Aesthetics in Japan: Absence of Female Material Bodies 90
• Meliur as a Figure of Omission in Konrad von Würzburg’s Partonopier und Meliur 110
• Repression and Omission in Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills 130
• Don’t Mention the Guns: Omission by Substitution in Simon Armitage’s Killing Time 152
• Omission and the Poetics of the EC Comics Twist: An Analysis of “Last Respects” (1951) and “Master Race” (1955) 168
• The Omissions of Intermediality: Pop Music and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad 182
• Aliens in the Void: Writing Beyond the Limits of Language in bpNichol’s The Martyrology (and (Luigi Serafini’s ((Code)x Seriphia 202