Citation:
Baudrillard, Jean. Cool Memories IV: 1995–2000. Translated by Chris Turner. London and New York: Verso, 2003.
Citation / Annotation:
Denman, Kamilla. “Emily Dickinson’s Volcanic Punctuation.” The Emily Dickinson Journal 2, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 22–46.
The punctuation and syntax create a halting but emotionally charged tone and mark the silent places where the speaker either cannot or dares not write. (38)
I came across this article while looking for discussions of Emily Dickinson’s use of the dash. Kamilla Denman describes Dickinson’s move from the earlier use of the exclamation mark to a mania for the dash. Initially Dickinson’s dashes create “disruptive and lingering pauses beyond anything required by conventional rules of punctuation” (38), but increasingly they are part of a move towards fragments, aphasia, silence, solitude, and nothingness—to fewer poems, fewer words in those poems, and the reduction of punctuation as, “at the end of her life, these marks increasingly fall away, leaving words and lines of poetry largely undirected and uncontrolled by the restrictions of punctuation” (41): “In her writing, one might say Dickinson moves increasingly towards silence” (37).
a journey that wasn't 