Writing and painting

Literature begins with deletion, as the wordplay of 'litté-rature' (Jean Bellemin-Noël) aptly suggests. The practically productive counterpoint to the act of writing is therefore not non-writing, but deletion. Deletions occur within the writing process itself and mark dynamic moments between retraction and resumption. The starting point of the contributions gathered here, arranged according to the historical sequence of their subjects, is the documentary materiality. They encompass the entire spectrum of the relationship between writing and deletion in modern literature: forms and functions, materials and sensory effects, historical conditions, rhetorical and poetic models, individual and cultural processes and disruptions, media-specific, personal, and political censorship.