Touching the screen: on visual textuality and knowledge construction in Anne Carson’s poetry

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article addresses the connections between material strategies and knowledge construction in contemporary literature. Through two case studies, Anne Carson’s Nox (2010) and The Beauty of the Husband (2001), this article argues that by capitalising on the material, often visual component of literature, Carson heightens an embodied reading process that encourages affective forms of knowledge. To this end, my reading builds on theories of visual textuality by Anne-Marie Christin and Johanna Drucker in conversation with insights from cognitive theory. Through an emphasis on visual patterns, the analysis demonstrates how the knowledge worlds evoked in these long poems, understood as referring to the epistemological premises and possibilities afforded by the literary work, are shaped by the visual screen of the page and of the literary work as a whole. As physical and imaginative spaces, Nox and The Beauty of the Husband thus stage intricate relationships between matter and knowledge, which are foregrounded in poetic and multimodal works but are present in all literary works to a certain extent. The implication is that readers can only know as much about a literary work as they can see and feel.