MLA 2014 Call for Papers: Deletion, Erasure, Cancellation

Recent critical trends in media studies have drawn crucially necessary attention to the materiality of media, expanding scholarly attention within the field beyond its early focus on narrative and representation. Questions of storage, inscription, and circulation have become vital avenues of inquiry in relation to both alphabetic and nonalphabetic texts, allowing for a reconsideration of what it means to produce, consume, and possess textual material in a wide range of media, from print codices and digital files to hard drives, servers, and fiber-optic cables. This panel seeks to build upon and extend this focus on materiality through a close consideration of practices such as deletion, erasure, and cancellation, acts that might collectively be termed “negative” textual operations. These practices, while considered relatively infrequently within media and textual studies, have a great deal to tell us about textuality and how we understand it as scholars and as agents within a culture of information. Indeed, attending to these practices raises a range of questions that complement the recent scholarly focus on the materiality of media, posing a framework in which qualities such as absence, removal, residue, blankness, and invisibility become essential criteria for critical analysis as well as for authorial and artistic production.

While the question of deletion and erasure has roots that date back to the early waves of poststructuralist thought, it has new relevance and urgency within a contemporary moment in which textual objects from throughout history seem increasingly permanent and redundant. Whether deletion and erasure serve to distort the public record and bolster state power or to craft an alternate, fugitive history; whether they take place as a result of artistic or authorial intervention, of random error, or of politically resistant counterstrike; they are ripe for a more fully articulated critical and historical context. How might we describe the aesthetics and poetics of deletion and erasure within and across various media forms? What do these practices, and the textual absences they produce, tell us about the materiality of writing and other media? About authorship, visuality, and memory? About how textual artifacts circulate between public and private domains? About the limitations and paradoxes of the archive? About the very ways in which we write the history of media?

This roundtable invites presentations that address questions of deletion, erasure, cancellation, and similar and related practices across all periods, genres, and media: approaches from book history, textual scholarship, media studies and media archeology, sound studies, videogame studies, the digital humanities, and other critical frameworks are all welcome. In order to allow for both a wide diversity of approaches and contributions and a fruitful, in-depth discussion among participants and audience members, participants will be asked to limit their remarks to ten-minute provocations. Please send inquiries and abstracts with short biographies to pbenzon at temple dot edu by March 1.