The Fabric of Stories: Materiality, Remembrance and Translation in Anne Carson’s Nox.

Abstract

Looking at Anne Carson's Nox as a crafted fabric, this thesis explores the profound relationship between a book’s material form and its meaning. Examining Nox within the theoretical framework of the artist's book, Nox's material form as fabric will be considered as firstly being ‘made of a life remembered’ and secondly as 'having the texture of remembering'. Both will be analyzed along the metaphor of translation as conceived by the philosopher Walter Benjamin. Ultimately this will answer the question of how the material form of Nox, when approached as a fabric, remembers a long-lost and deceased sibling, as well as the question of how print culture might not be ending but rather continues to live on differently.