Literary fragment

Last updated

Byzantine Egyptian papyrus fragment Papyrus-fragments-of-two-letters-b1fb17 (1).jpg
Byzantine Egyptian papyrus fragment

A literary fragment is a piece of text that may be part of a larger work, or that employs a 'fragmentary' form characterised by physical features such as short paragraphs or sentences separated by white space, and thematic features such as discontinuity, ambivalence, ambiguity, or lack of a traditional narrative structure. [1] [2]

Contents

While it is difficult to classify literary fragments, a number of critics agree on a basic taxonomy of two types of fragment: those who intentionally use fragmentation as a form in their writing, and those that are fragmented because they are incomplete or because parts have been lost over time. [1]

As a form, the literary fragment has been employed during the Romantic, Modernist, Postmodern and Contemporary literary periods as a way to reckon with the challenges of modernity. [1]

Criticism and theory

The literary fragment and the concept of fragmentariness presents several challenges to literary criticism, in part because of the difficulty in determining what constitutes a fragment. [3] Guignery and Drag write that the task of defining the literary fragment is "near-impossible". [4] Sophie Thomas writes that literary fragments "disturb characterization", as they exist somewhere between a part and a whole but do not belong to either. [5] Others, such as Hans-Jost Frey, suggest that the fragment may be entirely incompatible with literary theory because it is by nature "hostile to meaning", and defies the boundaries and borders upon which theory depends. [6]

The difficulty in defining the literary fragment is also due to the connotations of the word 'fragment' and its relationship to archaeology; while a fragment of pottery can suggest the part that was lost due to the nature of patterning, the literary fragment cannot represent its whole in the same way, which complicates the relationship between the literary fragment and its suggested whole. [7]

Literary fragments of larger works

The discovery of fragments of larger works has been of interest to scholars in many fields since at least the sixteenth century, and has formed the research basis of many fields since the establishment of academic disciplines in the nineteenth century. [8]  Historical literary fragments are studied closely in the fields of papyrology, which involves the study of papyrus texts almost all preserved in fragments, and the more recently established field of fragmentology, which involves the study of surviving fragments of mostly medieval European manuscripts. [8]

Historical literary fragments include the remains of works otherwise lost over time, such as in the case of the poetry of Sappho, as well as quotations in secondary texts from works that have never been discovered, such as in the work of Heraclitus. [3]

Fragment of the Tithonus poem by Greek poet Sappho, third century BCE. P.Koln XI 429.jpg
Fragment of the Tithonus poem by Greek poet Sappho, third century BCE.

Notable examples

Notable examples of writers of extant fragments of longer works include Sappho, Heraclitus, Sophocles, Xenophon, Antisthenes, Abydenus, Berossus, Sanchoniatho and Megasthenes. [3] [9] [10]

Further reading

Literary fragments as a form

Romantic period

The fragment as both theme and form is strongly associated with European Romanticism. [11]   While the Romantic fragment evolved out of the much earlier writings of Montaigne, Pascal and the English and French moralist tradition, [12] scholars note that the fragmentary form was established by a group of German writers associated with the Jena school including Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis. [3] The Jena Romantics, as well as Goethe, Nietzsche, Schiller and Walter Benjamin, saw the fragment as a literary form that offered freedom from the limitations imposed by traditional genres, had the potential to reject Enlightenment ways of thinking, and could reflect the fragmentary nature of existence while gesturing towards the future. [13] According to Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Lebarthe, the Romantic "aims at fragmentation for its own sake". [14]

This idea is also reflected in the work of the English late-Romantic poets who saw the potential of the fragmented form to express insights "that went beyond established forms and genres". [15]

The historical fragment and the motif of the historical ruin also gained popularity during this period, with many writers taking inspiration from recently discovered relics of the past. This interest in historical fragments saw several literary hoaxes in which Romantic writers including Thomas Chatterton and James Macpherson claimed to have translated or discovered historical fragments that were later shown to be their own modern creation. [13]

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan: Or A Vision in a Dream Kubla Khan preface.jpg
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan: Or A Vision in a Dream

Notable examples

Notable examples of authors that produced fragmentary work in the Romantic period includeSamuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats , Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. [15] [13]

Modernist period

The use of the fragment as a form is closely linked to the modernist literary tradition. [16] As Nora Golschmidt explains, "the fragment is so integral to the literary and visual cultures of modernism that it borders on cliche." [17]

The modernist literary movement is often described as being a repudiation of earlier ideas, but many note that modernist fragmentary writing was a clear response to the Romantic fragment poem. [18] While the Romantics saw the fragment as a way to reckon with ideas of possibility and limitlessness, the fragment that appeared during this period in the first half of the twentieth century was a response to the challenges of modernity. [17] As John Tytell explains, the fragment became synonymous with literary modernism because it represented "a new sense of the universe that began to emerge as the nineteenth century ended". [19] Industrialisation, technological advancement and developments in science all lead to significant societal changes, and the First World War "seemed to sever any reliable continuities with the values of the past", leading to a "fragmented experience of modernity". [17] These changes prompted writers to seek a new mode of representation that could represent the complexity of the modern world.

According to Gasiorek, the modernist period saw the literary fragment become part of the novel, the genre previously considered the least consistent with fragmentation. He explains that the modernists adopted the fragment as a rejection of realism that was seen as an "unwarrantedly stable and epistemologically confident narrative mode", and instead,

developed novelistic  forms  that  were  fragmented,  deployed  multiple  viewpoints,  emphasised  the  subjective  nature  of  experience, disrupted narrative chronology, drew attention to the fictive nature of their narrative procedures, experimented with language, and, by refusing the comforts of closure, remained steadfastly open‐ended. [16]

Notable examples

Notable examples of authors that produced fragmentary work in the Modernist period include T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound. [20] [21]

Postmodern period

The postmodern period saw a renewed focus on the literary fragment as a rejection of traditional narrative modes, leading Paul Virilio to label the period as "the age of micro-narrative, the art of the fragment". [22] While the modernists saw the fragment as a way of making sense of the chaos of the modernising world and searching for unity in a disjointed world, the postmodern period saw writers "give up Modernist attempts to restore wholeness to a fragmented world", [23] dispensing with the notion of over-arching meaning, instead representing the world as fundamentally fractured and disordered. [22]

The postmodern literary fragment is characterised by mosaic, montage, collage, polyphonic narrative and voices, multiple perspectives, pastiche, duplication, mirroring, and incompletion. [24] Douwe Fokkema writes that the Postmodern fragment emphasises discontinuity and destroys connectivity, explaining that "many Postmodernist texts are a collection of relatively unconnected fragments, which challenge the literary code that predisposes the reader to look for coherence." [25]

Notable examples

Notable examples of authors that produced fragmentary work in the Postmodern period include William S. Burroughs, Kathy Acker, Donald Barthelme, John Barth, B.S. Johnson andRobert Coover. [20] [26]

Contemporary period

Eula Biss, 2019 Eula Biss 2019 (cropped).jpg
Eula Biss, 2019

The contemporary period has seen an increase in the prevalence of fragmentation in works of literature. [20] Wojciech Drąg notes that this period has seen a revival of fragmentary writing that poses a new kind of challenge for the reader, as it rejects narrative conventions and conventional novelistic structures, favours non-linearity, experimentation with chronology, metatextuality, repetition, listing and the use of citations in creative works. [20]

Critics such as Shannon Callaghan note that the contemporary fragment offers a new way of representing marginalised identities and traumatic experiences outside of traditional narrative structures. [27] Guignery and Drag note that the contemporary fragment might also be a response to the "accelerated culture of social media and overcommunication within which long-form fiction seems increasingly anachronistic." [1]

Notable examples

Notable examples of authors producing fragmented work in the Contemporary period include Mark Z. Danielewski, Maggie Nelson, David Shields, Jenny Offill, Jenny Boully, Anne Carson, Jonathan Safran Foer, Eula Biss, Kate Zambreno, Ali Smith, J. M. Coetzee and David Mitchell. [20] [28]

Further reading

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Modernism</span> Philosophical and art movement

Modernism was an early 20th-century movement in literature, visual arts, and music that emphasized experimentation, abstraction, and subjective experience. Philosophy, politics, architecture, and social issues were also aspects of the movement, which arose from a "growing alienation" from prevailing "morality, optimism, and convention" and a desire to change how "human beings in a society interact and live together".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Literary criticism</span> Study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature

A genre of arts criticism, literary criticism or literary studies is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often influenced by literary theory, which is the philosophical analysis of literature's goals and methods. Although the two activities are closely related, literary critics are not always, and have not always been, theorists.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Postmodern art</span> Art movement

Postmodern art is a body of art movements that sought to contradict some aspects of modernism or some aspects that emerged or developed in its aftermath. In general, movements such as intermedia, installation art, conceptual art and multimedia, particularly involving video are described as postmodern.

An art movement is a tendency or style in art with a specific art philosophy or goal, followed by a group of artists during a specific period of time, or, at least, with the heyday of the movement defined within a number of years. Art movements were especially important in modern art, when each consecutive movement was considered a new avant-garde movement. Western art had been, from the Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th century, underpinned by the logic of perspective and an attempt to reproduce an illusion of visible reality. By the end of the 19th century many artists felt a need to create a new style which would encompass the fundamental changes taking place in technology, science and philosophy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Modernist poetry in English</span>

Modernist poetry in English started in the early years of the 20th century with the appearance of the Imagists. Like other modernists, Imagist poets wrote in reaction to the perceived excesses of Victorian poetry, and its emphasis on traditional formalism and ornate diction.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fredric Jameson</span> American academic and literary critic (born 1934)

Fredric Jameson is an American literary critic, philosopher and Marxist political theorist. He is best known for his analysis of contemporary cultural trends, particularly his analysis of postmodernity and capitalism. Jameson's best-known books include Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) and The Political Unconscious (1981).

Postmodern dance is a 20th century concert dance form that came into popularity in the early 1960s. While the term "postmodern" took on a different meaning when used to describe dance, the dance form did take inspiration from the ideologies of the wider postmodern movement, which "sought to deflate what it saw as overly pretentious and ultimately self-serving modernist views of art and the artist" and was, more generally, a departure from modernist ideals. Lacking stylistic homogeny, Postmodern dance was discerned mainly by its anti-modern dance sentiments rather than by its dance style. The dance form was a reaction to the compositional and presentational constraints of the preceding generation of modern dance, hailing the use of everyday movement as valid performance art and advocating for unconventional methods of dance composition.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Postmodern literature</span> 20th-century literary form and movement

Postmodern literature is a form of literature that is characterized by the use of metafiction, unreliable narration, self-reflexivity, intertextuality, and which often thematizes both historical and political issues. This style of experimental literature emerged strongly in the United States in the 1960s through the writings of authors such as Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, Philip K. Dick, Kathy Acker, and John Barth. Postmodernists often challenge authorities, which has been seen as a symptom of the fact that this style of literature first emerged in the context of political tendencies in the 1960s. This inspiration is, among other things, seen through how postmodern literature is highly self-reflexive about the political issues it speaks to.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Modernism (music)</span> Changes in musical form during the early 20th Century

In music, modernism is an aesthetic stance underlying the period of change and development in musical language that occurred around the turn of the 20th century, a period of diverse reactions in challenging and reinterpreting older categories of music, innovations that led to new ways of organizing and approaching harmonic, melodic, sonic, and rhythmic aspects of music, and changes in aesthetic worldviews in close relation to the larger identifiable period of modernism in the arts of the time. The operative word most associated with it is "innovation". Its leading feature is a "linguistic plurality", which is to say that no one music genre ever assumed a dominant position.

Inherent within musical modernism is the conviction that music is not a static phenomenon defined by timeless truths and classical principles, but rather something which is intrinsically historical and developmental. While belief in musical progress or in the principle of innovation is not new or unique to modernism, such values are particularly important within modernist aesthetic stances.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Literary modernism</span> Western literary movement, originating in the late 19th century

Modernist literature, originated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and is characterised by a self-conscious separation from traditional ways of writing in both poetry and prose fiction writing. Modernism experimented with literary form and expression, as exemplified by Ezra Pound's maxim to "Make it new." This literary movement was driven by a conscious desire to overturn traditional modes of representation and express the new sensibilities of the time. The immense human costs of the First World War saw the prevailing assumptions about society reassessed, and much modernist writing engages with the technological advances and societal changes of modernity moving into the 20th century. In Modernist Literature, Mary Ann Gillies notes that these literary themes share the "centrality of a conscious break with the past", one that "emerges as a complex response across continents and disciplines to a changing world".

Post-romanticism or Postromanticism refers to a range of cultural endeavors and attitudes emerging in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, after the period of Romanticism.

A vignette is a French loanword expressing a short and descriptive piece of writing that captures a brief period in time. Vignettes are more focused on vivid imagery and meaning rather than plot. Vignettes can be stand-alone, but they are more commonly part of a larger narrative, such as vignettes found in novels or collections of short stories.

The concept of genius, in literary theory and literary history, derives from the later 18th century, when it began to be distinguished from ingenium in a discussion of the genius loci, or "spirit of the place". It was a way of discussing essence, in that each place was supposed to have its own unique and immutable nature, but this essence was determinant, in that all persons of a place would be infused or inspired by that nature. In the early nationalistic literary theories of the Augustan era, each nation was supposed to have a nature determined by its climate, air, and fauna that made a nation's poetry, manners, and art singular. It created national character.

Joel Black is a Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia. Black has written extensively on subfields of literature and film studies areas such as romanticism, postmodernism, philosophy and history of science, and cultural studies. He is the author of The Aesthetics of Murder: A Study in Romantic Literature and Contemporary Culture (1991) and The Reality Effect: Film Culture and the Graphic Imperative (2002).

In the visual arts, late modernism encompasses the overall production of most recent art made between the aftermath of World War II and the early years of the 21st century. The terminology often points to similarities between late modernism and postmodernism, although there are differences. The predominant term for art produced since the 1950s is contemporary art. Not all art labelled as contemporary art is modernist or post-modern, and the broader term encompasses both artists who continue to work in modern and late modernist traditions, as well as artists who reject modernism for post-modernism or other reasons. Arthur Danto argues explicitly in After the End of Art that contemporaneity was the broader term, and that postmodern objects represent a subsector of the contemporary movement which replaced modernity and modernism, while other notable critics: Hilton Kramer, Robert C. Morgan, Kirk Varnedoe, Jean-François Lyotard and others have argued that postmodern objects are at best relative to modernist works.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">English literature</span> Literary works written in the English language

English literature is literature written in the English language from the English-speaking world. The English language has developed over the course of more than 1,400 years. The earliest forms of English, a set of Anglo-Frisian dialects brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon invaders in the fifth century, are called Old English. Beowulf is the most famous work in Old English, and has achieved national epic status in England, despite being set in Scandinavia. However, following the Norman conquest of England in 1066, the written form of the Anglo-Saxon language became less common. Under the influence of the new aristocracy, French became the standard language of courts, parliament, and polite society. The English spoken after the Normans came is known as Middle English. This form of English lasted until the 1470s, when the Chancery Standard, a London-based form of English, became widespread. Geoffrey Chaucer (1343–1400), author of The Canterbury Tales, was a significant figure in the development of the legitimacy of vernacular Middle English at a time when the dominant literary languages in England were still French and Latin. The invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in 1439 also helped to standardise the language, as did the King James Bible (1611), and the Great Vowel Shift.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jay Clayton (critic)</span>

Jay Clayton is an American literary critic who is known for his work on the relationship between nineteenth-century culture and postmodernism. He has published influential works on Romanticism and the novel, Neo-Victorian literature, steampunk, hypertext fiction, online games, contemporary American fiction, technology in literature, and genetics in literature and film. He is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English and Director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University.

<i>With the People from the Bridge</i> 2014 book by Dimitris Lyacos

With the People from the Bridge is the second part of the Poena Damni trilogy by Greek author Dimitris Lyacos. The book deals with the theme of loss and the return of the dead in the context of Christian teleology. The text is encased in a post-theatrical ritual drama form, drawing on various philosophical and literary sources as well as ancient and modern Greek folklore. The plot-line centers around an Orpheus-like journey of the protagonist LG who joins his deceased companion in the grave and is subsequently led by her to a liminal realm ahead of the imminent Resurrection Day. The work has been categorized by critics to belong to both the Modernist and the Post-Modernist tradition, while at the same time bearing strong affinities to a variety of canonical texts, among others Homer, Dante, Kafka, Joyce and Beckett.

J. R. R. Tolkien, the author of the bestselling fantasy The Lord of the Rings, was largely rejected by the literary establishment during his lifetime, but has since been accepted into the literary canon, if not as a modernist then certainly as a modern writer responding to his times. He fought in the First World War, and saw the rural England that he loved built over and industrialised. His Middle-earth fantasy writings, consisting largely of a legendarium which was not published until after his death, embodied his realism about the century's traumatic events, and his Christian hope.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 Guignery, Vanessa; Drag, Wojciech Drag (2019). The Poetics of Fragmentation in Contemporary British and American Fiction. Delaware: Vernon Press. pp. xvii.
  2. ↑ Jovanovic, Evelina Saponjic (2019-12-22). "Fragment as a Storytelling Device". Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics. 42 (3): 125–140.
  3. 1 2 3 4 Elias, Camelia (2004). The Fragment: Towards a History and Poetics of a Performative Genre. Harvard: Peter Lang. p. 3.
  4. ↑ Guignery, Vanessa (2019). The Poetics of Fragmentation in Contemporary British and American Fiction. Delaware: Vernon Press. pp. xviii.
  5. ↑ Thomas, Sophie (2005). "The Fragment". In Roe, Nicholas (ed.). Romanticism. Oxford Academic. pp. 511–512.
  6. ↑ Frey, Hans-Jost (1996). Interruptions. State University of New York Press. p. 25.
  7. ↑ Baltussen, Han; Olson, S. Douglas (2017). "Epilogue: A Conversation on Fragments". Journal of Juristic Papyrology. 30: 393–406.
  8. 1 2 Duba, William; Flüeler, Christoph (2018). "Fragments and fragmentology". Fragmentology. 1: 1–5.
  9. ↑ Prince, Susan H.; Antisthenes (2015). Antisthenes of Athens: texts, translations, and commentary. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ISBN   978-0-472-11934-9.
  10. ↑ Cory, Isaac Preston (1828). The ancient fragments ; containing what remains of the writings of Sanchoniatho, Berossus, Abydenus, Megasthenes, and Manetho. Also the Hermetic creed, the Old chronicle, the Laterculus of Eratosthenes, the Tyrian annals, the Oracles of Zoroaster, and the Periplus of Hanno. London: W. Pickering.
  11. ↑ Sandford, Stella (2016). "The dream is a fragment: Freud, transdisciplinarity and early German Romanticism". Radical Philosophy. 198: 25.
  12. ↑ Gasche, Rodolphe (1991). "Foreword: Ideality in Fragmentation". In Schlegel, Friedrich; Firchow, Peter; Gasche, Rodolphe (eds.). Philosophical Fragments. University of Minnesota Press.
  13. 1 2 3 Janowitz, Ann (2017). "The Romantic Fragment". In Wu, Duncan (ed.). A Companion to Romanticism. Oxford: Blackwell. p. 479.
  14. ↑ Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe; Nancy, Jean-Luc (1988). The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism. Translated by Barnard, P; Lester, C. SUNY Press. p. 41.
  15. 1 2 Tronzo, William (2009). The Fragment: An Incomplete History. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute. p. 16.
  16. 1 2 Gąsiorek, Andrzej (2015-06-22). A History of Modernist Literature (1 ed.). Wiley. p. 6. doi:10.1002/9781118607305.ch0. ISBN   978-1-4051-7716-0.
  17. 1 2 3 Goldschmidt, Nora (2023-12-07), "Introduction", Fragmentary Modernism, Oxford University PressOxford, p. 1, doi:10.1093/oso/9780192863409.003.0001, ISBN   0-19-286340-1 , retrieved 2024-04-30
  18. ↑ Guignery, Vanessa; Drag, Wojciech (2019). "Introduction: the art of the fragment". In Guignery, Vanessa; Drag, Wojciech (eds.). The Poetics of Fragmentation in Contemporary British and American Fiction. Delaware: Vernon Press. pp. xiv.
  19. ↑ Tytell, J (1981). "Epiphany in Chaos: Fragmentation in Modernism". In Krirzman, L. D. (ed.). Fragments: Incompletion and Discontinuity. New York Literary Forum. p. 3.
  20. 1 2 3 4 5 Drąg, Wojciech (2017-12-20). "Jenny Offill's Dept. of Speculation and the Revival of Fragmentary Writing". Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies. 56: 57. doi: 10.26754/ojs_misc/mj.20176787 . ISSN   2386-4834.
  21. ↑ Bruns, Gerald L. (2018). Interruptions: the fragmentary aesthetic in modern literature. Modern and Contemporary Poetics. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press. ISBN   978-0-8173-5906-5.
  22. 1 2 Virilio, Paul; Lotringer, Sylvère (1983). Pure War. Translated by Polizzotti, Mark. New York: Semiotext(e). p. 35.
  23. ↑ Wilde, Alan (1981). Horizons of Assent: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Ironic Imagination. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. p. 42.
  24. ↑ Feng, Zongxin (2013). "A Mosaic of Fragments as Narrative Practice: Maqiao Dictionary". Narrative. 21 (3): 333–345. ISSN   1063-3685.
  25. ↑ Fokkema, Douwe Wessel (1984). Literary history, modernism, and postmodernism. Utrecht publications in general and comparative literature. Amsterdam ; Philadelphia: J. Benjamins Pub. Co. p. 44. ISBN   978-90-272-2194-0.
  26. ↑ Suver, Stacey Andrew (2017). "Interzone's a Riot: William S. Burroughs and Writing the Moroccan Revolution". Journal of Transnational American Studies. 8 (1). doi:10.5070/T881028666.
  27. ↑ Callahan, Shannon (2020). "The Female and the Fragment(ed)". Body Studies Journal. 2 (2): 9–18.
  28. ↑ Burke, Jordan (2022). "What Lyric Is Missing: Anne Carson and the Contemporary Fragment". Contemporary Literature. 63 (2): 149–173. ISSN   1548-9949.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.