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What can one say in general of a text by Ben Marcus which would not already be somehow compromised by the radicalism of the writing? What can one say in particular of Notable American Women which would not already be disclaimed or “un-said” by the fiction of its very language? A fiction that makes this self-referential piece of writing—self-referential in a sense that would have to be redefined, along with the very notion of “sense” itself—hover above emptiness and verge on silence. Yet precisely, can one set limits to silence and emptiness, can one keep them at bay? Or rather, does this absence not keep any critical contribution at a distance? What form then can one bestow on the silence and vacancy that permeate the text if not that of superfluity, until both fiction and criticism converge in a same refusal, authoritarian as it may appear, of authority itself, i.e., the authority of their own presuppositions and their very language?

Even more blatantly than other innovative contemporary work, The Water Cure illustrates that traditional categories of genre no longer stand. Percival Everett's book blends poetry and prose, text and pictures, drama and philosophical meditation, while language itself increasingly comes under scrutiny and into question. The medium of fiction is used to explore understanding and representation: how do we make sense and conversely how much does it take for meaning to collapse or disintegrate? Ultimately, the question is raised of the use of fiction, and the answer offered suggests its uselessness: a comforting absence of immediate purpose that implies a possibility of radical changes for whoever runs the risk of reading it.

Exploring Aristotle's and Augustine's conceptions of time, but especially relying on the psychoanalytical concept of Nachträglichkeit (“deferment”) and its stimulating reading by Derrida in “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” this paper thinks of Lark and Termite, Jayne Anne Phillips's latest novel, in terms of trauma. It particularly delves into the notion of Bahnung (“Breach”), and intends to demonstrate that the labor of writing follows an a-chrono-logical, non causal pattern. Termite, the mentally-impaired boy, “born into absence,” reveals himself to be the active principle of a text in which the child is the father of the man and the present engenders the past. The springs of creation must then be sought in a subtle rhyming interplay that weaves the poetical and “magically unrealistic” fabric of the novel.

TOC, Steve Tomasula's latest multimedia novel, presents a fabled genealogy of time from its birth to its collapse and goes back to the origins of the catastrophe: a linear, abstract and universal time, a time decoupled from processes—clock-time—has supplanted natural cycles. Clocks, which have sprung from an indissoluble conjugation of the verbal and the temporal, burden our apprehension of processes and life with a sense of direction and discontinuity inherited from the structures of language. To counter the influence of clocks and the “care” they manufacture, TOC dismantles their linguistic machinery and causes them to break down. Following in Augustine's footsteps, Tomasula explores the impasse which, being caught in “the groove of language,” our representations of time have reached. Since the deadlock is unbreakable, the novel offers to simply turn away from it; leaving behind our concepts of time, it suggests a different approach to inhabiting time. Allowing the user to navigate according to the mood of the moment, it makes browsing a privileged path towards another way of living out time.

Published in 2006, Mark Z. Danielewski's third novel, Only Revolutions, is a strikingly visual text made of the combination of two figures (the circle and the line), two colors (golden and green), and two narrative voices. The rather sophisticated and systematic principles that rule the composition of the book also prescribe new ways of reading following the poetics of circularity generated by the writing. This paper shows how such a poetics results from the creation of a narrative out of the interaction between writing, print text, and book.

In her three electronic works, Shelley Jackson exacerbates the tension between self-writing and the diffraction of subjectivity, as she engages with a more explicit autobiographic form. Shifting from hyperfiction in Patchwork Girl (1995) to a fictionalized exercise in remembering through the scrutiny of her body parts in My Body & A Wunderkammer (1997), she eventually explores a pseudo-historiographic and documentary approach of the games she used to play with her sister in The Doll Games (2001), a work closer to an online family album of sorts. The present article purports to interrogate the preservation of the intimate in a context of public self-exposure through an archival electronic medium.