The Unsettled Surface of the Document
Seams, Erosion, and After-images in Charles Reznikoff's Holocaust
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 16714896 |
|---|---|
| Authors | James Belflower (0009-0002-5539-1523, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 28 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Publication date | 2017-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Postmodern Culture (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1053-1920 • E-ISSN: 1053-1920 |
| Publisher | Project MUSE (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1353/pmc.2017.0012 |
| OpenAlex | W2893946597 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 4 |
The psychoanalytic trope of "unsettlement" in American postmodern documentary poetry typically aims to narrate the emotional intractability of historical records into an impasse: a position of emotional unintelligibility designed to interrupt a reader's conventional modes of empathic identification with trauma. However, the affective dimension of this impasse—and its capacity to reconfigure the emotional negotiations required for empathic response—remains largely under-examined. This essay theorizes that impasse by arguing that Charles Reznikoff's documentary poem Holocaust rewrites it as an affective surface on which emotional contracts are unsettled by a textual materiality inflected by affect's somatic "touch
Aesthetics · Affect (linguistics · Art · Linguistics · Literature · Materiality (auditing · Poetry · Postmodernism · Psychoanalysis · Psychoanalytic theory · The Holocaust · History · Literature and Cultural Memory · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Narrative Theory and Analysis · Philosophy · Psychology
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |