Special Focus: "Omission", edited by Patrick Gill Throughout literary history and in a variety of cultures, we encounter an astute use of conspicuous absences to conjure an imagined reality into a recipient’s mind. The term ‘omission’ as used in the present study, then, demarcates a common artistic phenomenon: a silence, blank, or absence, introduced against the recipient’s generic or experiential expectations, frequently symbolic of the tenor of the work itself. Such omissions can be employed for their affective potential, when emotions represented or evoked by the text are deemed to be beyond words. They can be employed to raise epistemological questions when the omission in question marks the limits of what can be known. Ethical questions can also be approached by means of omissions, when a character is shown to have no voice, for instance. Finally, omission always carries within it the potential to reflect on the media and genres on which it is brought to bear: being acutely dependent on the recipient’s generic expectations for its own efficacy, omission is frequently characterized by a high degree of meta-discursiveness. This volume investigates the various strategies with which the phenomenon of omission is employed across a variety of forms and cultures to conclusively argue for its status as a highly effective and near-universal form of artistic signification. weiterlesen