Originally published on eve.gd on 7 February 2019, last updated 6 September 2026.
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I have a new article out in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction on how to read redaction in contemporary fiction.
how to read redaction in contemporary fiction
In this work, I produce an initial taxonomy of redactive functions and the contextual restrictions that are placed on the withheld content, following the work of Lisa Gitelman and others:
1. as limited linguistic structures; only certain types of term can fall into a redaction due to context (such as addresses);
2. as spatially limited; signified by the size of the redacted block and the correlative length of the underlying word (“The Sun” newspaper, composed of two short redactemes, for example);
3. as legal signifier; implying an underlying truth/falsity dichotomy (“it may be true, but we might be sued for it being untrue”) and a conspiratorial environment that would be repressed if expressed in toto (redaction of names);
4. as part of novelistic tradition; implicitly demonstrating the fictionality of the device through the tradition dating back to at least the eighteenth century;
5. as postmodern signifier of detective work allied to literary interpretation; an artifice that signals the reader’s role in attempting to uncover what lies beneath;
6. as invitation to contextual or symptomatic reading; a way of signaling that the text is withholding contextual information that must be supplied by a reader.
I suspect this is far from comprehensive, but it’s as far as I got.
The piece is openly available and available for direct download. It’s also in Birkbeck’s institutional repository and available freely from the publisher.
available for direct download
Birkbeck’s institutional repository
available freely from the publisher
Finally, I would only note that the conflict of interest statement is not correct yet. I provided this multiple times to Taylor and Francis, but it has not appeared on the final version: “The author works at the same university as Mark Blacklock, whose novel is one of the subjects of this article.” I hope this will be corrected soon.
This reference list has been generated, in many cases, through an automated process and may therefore contain errors or incomplete metadata. It is provided purely as assistance for finding the items mentioned within this post.
1. Eve, Martin Paul, ‘Reading Redaction: Symptomatic Metadata, Erasure Poetry, and Mark Blacklock’sI’m Jack’, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Informa UK Limited, 6 February 2019 <https://doi.org/10.1080/00111619.2019.1568960>
2. Eve, Martin Paul, ‘Reading Redaction: Symptomatic Metadata, Erasure Poetry, and Mark Blacklock's I'm Jack’, 6 February 2019 <http://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/25540>
https://doi.org/10.1080/00111619.2019.1568960
http://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/25540