The Materiality of Absence in Paul Auster’s Poetry and Fiction

Abstract

ABSTRACT Through mapping the blank landscapes and stones in Paul Auster’s writing, and through the employment of a framework that reads Auster alongside twenty-first-century theories of minimalist aesthetics, this article demonstrates how his early poetry and later fiction frequently explore a politics of erasure. The intersection of an austere literary style with contextually flat representations of crumbling stones, work, and conspicuously omitted power structures affords a previously unacknowledged environmental context underpinning Auster’s thinking. By recalling his early poetry and later novels that dramatise comparable scenarios of labour and loss under the shadow of external threat, I explore how frequent representations of erasure echo environmental and cultural anxieties related to memory and future uncertainty.