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Iconicity in Cognition and across Semiotic Systems
Edited by Sara Lenninger, Olga Fischer, Christina Ljungberg and Elżbieta Tabakowska
[Iconicity in Language and Literature 18] 2022
► pp. 173–192

Iconicity for an iconoclast

Susan Howe’s critique of representational practices

| Bloxham School
Susan Howe’s poetry regularly draws attention to its appearance on the page, but the often abstract or iconoclastic nature of her work means that we rarely encounter cases where visual form mimes meaning in an obvious way. In places, though, Howe uses the iconic potential of abstract arrangements of text to target forms of representation that have been associated with the violence of colonization and with social injustice. A self-reflexive anxiety emerges as it becomes difficult to distinguish between the form of what is targeted and the form of the text itself. My study offers a close analysis of two examples: the opening of Secret History of the Dividing Line (1978) and a lyric from Bed Hangings (2001) that is framed by an illustration (by the artist Susan Bee) which helps to reveal the iconicity at work. I go on to relate Howe’s thinking about the nature of the sign – and of the relationship between words and the objects they represent – to Peirce’s ideas.
Article outline
  • 1.Abstraction and iconicity
  • 2.Tracing targets: Iconicity within an iconoclastic poetics
  • 3.Mind and matter
  • 4.The world in the word
  • Acknowledgements
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 10 November 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ill.18.09moy
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