Nonnarrative and history in Barrett Watten’s "Under erasure"

  1. Manuel Brito 1
  1. 1 Universidad de La Laguna
    info

    Universidad de La Laguna

    San Cristobal de La Laguna, España

    ROR https://ror.org/01r9z8p25

Journal:
Atlantis: Revista de la Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos

ISSN: 0210-6124

Year of publication: 2018

Volume: 40

Issue: 1

Pages: 153-174

Type: Article

DOI: 10.28914/ATLANTIS-2018-40.1.08 DIALNET GOOGLE SCHOLAR lock_openOpen access editor

More publications in: Atlantis: Revista de la Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos

Abstract

This essay analyzes how Barrett Watten’s long poem, Under Erasure (1991), concentrates on erasure and displacement through the nonnarrative forms of the poem, in which diverse narrations of historical events are present to claim for their discontinuity and the author’s self-consciousness. In formulating those nonnarrative forms in relation to a time structure of continual leaps and absences in his The Constructivist Moment (2003), Watten’s vision of both poetry and history requires agency and the transformation of ideology. For him, nonnarrative poetry and history are strikingly similar in their preference for developing episodic remembering beyond periodization or conventional narrative frame. His approach calls for reflection on the connections of both identity and information as global processes of continual re-interpretation and erasure. More synchronic than diachronic, Under Erasure employs a repeated stanzaic structure throughout the whole poem. All this reveals Watten’s essential paradox: regardless of rigid formal structure, writing is continually generating diverse meanings. By means of these conceptual and formal principles, Watten has investigated how to gain access to a new representation through nonrepresentation, simply by radically re-historicizing what was once culturally reduced.

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