Unspeakable Things: Omission, Ellipsis, and Erasure from Censorship to Creative Strategy, 1910-1930s

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel explores the significance of signs of omission in Eastern Slavic culture. Blank spaces and erased content appeared in various forms, implicit and explicit, symbolic and literal throughout cultural production of the early twentieth-century. Focusing on writers and artists active throughout the Russian empire and its borderlands, including Ukraine and Georgia, from 1913 to 1932, this panel charts the effect and affect of creative omission as a literary device. From resistance narrative to subversive mimicry, we critically reexamine the many strategies involved in reading blank space. Absence and gaps — whether intentional or not, whether imposed by the author or an external agent — require new methodological approaches to understand and this panel brings together papers that offer theoretical reflections on how we can approach them. Ranging from textual gaps to fragmentary artworks, the panel showcases the conceptual and methodological diversity inspired by ellipsis, erasure, and emptiness.

Sub Unit

• Arts I: Visual Culture, Material Culture, Applied and Fine Arts

Chair

• Alexandra Dennett, Harvard U

Papers

• Dot Dot Dot: Futurist Punctuation and Elliptical Censorship in Avant-Garde Books, 1910-1917 - Kamila Kocialkowska, U of Warwick (UK)

• Soviet Ellipsis: Omission as Technique in Russian and Ukrainian Interwar Literature - Vera Faber, U of Oslo (Norway)

• Reading Constraints: Interpretations of Censorship in Andrei Bely’s 'Petersburg' - Jesper Nyeng, U of Copenhagen (Denmark)

Discussant

• Samuel Johnson, Syracuse U