ABSTRACT
Drawing from Roland Barthes’ essays on the artist Cy Twombly, this chapter discusses the event of the graphic mark – the scribble, the doodle, the illegible line – in relation to the theory of the literary event. Through comparative discussions of Twombly, Emily Dickinson, and the contemporary US poet Renee Gladman, the chapter develops three scenes of the graphic event: margin, letter, and sentence. Arguing for an interdisciplinary understanding of ‘marginal literature’, the chapter argues that a focus on the graphic event can dissolve the medium specificity that the discourse of the literary event tends to enshrine, and offers a means of thinking through the relations of visibility and legibility that are essentially implicated in the circulation and reception of texts.
