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

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

Aesthetics · Art · Literature · Poetry · American and British Literature Analysis · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Philosophy · Poetry Analysis and Criticism

• Introduction

  Demi Wilton, Oliver Haslam•Green Letters•2024

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• Cruel Optimism

  Lauren Berlant, Lauren Gail Berlant•Cruel Optimism•2011

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• The imagery of writing in the early works of Paul Auster

  Andrea Pitozzi•Textual Practice•2018

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