Epigrams, particle theory, and hypertext

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Epigrams, particle theory, and hypertext

Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.3/23906

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Title: Epigrams, particle theory, and hypertext
Author(s): Tofts, Darren
Abstract: Epigrams are used traditionally to presage a beginning, the beginning. They announce the thematic import of the discourse that is to follow. The epigram is a kind of pretalk, an avant-scene. Sometimes there is more than one. In the case of multipIe epigrams, an entirely new system of relations is established between the epigrams themselves, a prestructuring within a prestructure. This kind of interconnected multiplicity---of a kind that detained the attention of the two great Augustan satirists of pedantry, Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift---prompts a question: What if the epigram is the event and not its harbinger? What, in other words, if the epigram is not the link that prepares us for conceptual passage elsewhere but is itself a singular event in which an entire discourse is implicit?
Publication type: Book chapter
Research centre: Swinburne University of Technology. Faculty of Life and Social Sciences
Source: Contemporary poetics / Louis Armand (ed.), Part 4, chapter 16, pp. 220-232
Publication year: 2007
Keyword(s): 20th century literature; Avant-garde; Borges, Jorge Luis (1899-1986); Calvino, Italo (1923-1985); Deleuze, Gilles (1925-1995); Epigrams; Guattari, Felix (1930-1992); Literary criticism; Modern literature; Modernism studies; Poetics; Philosophy; Theory
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 9780810123595, 0810123606
Publisher URL: http://www.nupress.northwestern.edu/Title/tabid/68/ISBN/0-8101-2360-6/Default.aspx
Publisher URL: http://books.google.com/books?id=wiRRKN9C3BoC
Peer reviewed