Authorial Impression and Remediation in Anne Carson’s Quasi-Artist’s Book Nox

Abstract

Combining a media studies approach with the theoretical framework of new materialism, Kiene Brillenburg Wurth probes how Anne Carson’s folded book Nox puts its own mediality on display to reflect on the intertwining of its material and symbolic dimensions. Brillenburg Wurth shows that Carson simulates the hand-crafted authenticity of artist’s books through the use of technologies like Xeroxing and scanning, aesthetic methods like scrap booking and collage, and poetics that combine (auto)biographical writing with translation. Tracing the US avant-garde context in which Roland Barthes’s seminal essay “The Death of the Author” was first published, Brillenburg Wurth explores how book fictions and quasi-artist’s books like Carson’s Nox reintroduce a concern with authorship to contemporary literature while continuing to champion avant-garde practices of depersonalization.