Front Matter -- Copyright Page -- 1 Introduction: Meaningful Absence across Media. The Potential Significance of Missing Signifiers 1 /Werner Wolf -- 2 Absent Signifiers in Contemporary American Fiction and Creative Non-Fiction 32 /Nassim Winnie Balestrini -- 3 A Sentence is a Half-Formed Thing: Observations on Iconic and Indexical (Morpho)Syntactic Blanks Inspired by Eimear McBride’s Debut Novel 59 /Olga Fischer -- 4 On the Impact of Voids: Musical Silence and Visual Absence in Film 87 /Saskia Jaszoltowski -- 5 Significant Absence in Narrative Fiction Film 101 /Klaus Rieser -- 6 Gaps as Significant Absences: The Case of Serial Comics 126 /Daniel Stein -- 7 Dramaturgy of Silence: Absence as a Means of Structural Tension in Joseph Haydn’s String Quartets 156 /Peter Revers -- 8 Absence of Words and Absence of Music in Opera 173 /Walter Bernhart -- 9 “Où est l’art? perdu, disparu!”: Meaningful Absence in 19th- to 21st-Century Painting 193 /Henry Keazor -- 10 Silent Spaces: Absent Signifiers in Modernist Architecture 217 /Anselm Wagner -- List of Figures 245 -- Notes on Contributors 247 -- Back Matter -- Index. This volume focusses on a rarely discussed method of meaning production, namely via the absence, rather than presence, of signifiers. It does so from an interdisciplinary, transmedial perspective, which covers systematic, media-comparative and historical aspects, and reveals various forms and functions of missing signifiers across arts and media. The meaningful silences, blanks, lacunae, pauses, et cetera, treated by the ten contributors are taken from language and literature, film, comics, opera and instrumental music, architecture, and the visual arts. Contributors are: Nassim Balestrini, Walter Bernhart, Olga Fischer, Saskia Jaszoltowski, Henry Keazor, Peter Revers, Klaus Rieser, Daniel Stein, Anselm Wagner, Werner Wolf
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