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Excerpt
from the introduction
As indicated by the title of my
book, the
work
proposes to produce readings of the fragment in a historical
perspective, as well as a labelling of various fragments in generic
terms. Furthermore the book is a contribution to the field in
the sense that it proposes a first descriptive poetics of the types of
fragments that function performatively. The work consequently begins
with definitions of the key concepts of fragment, performativity,
genre, and their relation to history and poetics. These definitions are
rendered in short form in the following.
First
the notion
of
"fragment" is examined through the word’s etymology. The word
"fragment" derives from the Latin fragmentum, remnant, whose
root, frangere, means to break into fragments. An interesting
aspect of the root frangere is that it points to a necessary
plurality of fragments, since it is a logical impossibility to break a
whole into one fragment. In all definitions drawing upon the above
etymology, it is shown that, formally speaking, a relation between the
part and the whole is presupposed to be constitutive of the notion of
the fragment. The consequence of defining the fragment in terms of a
part/whole relation is that the fragment is always seen as derived from
and subordinate to an original whole text. This is shown to have marked
the entire research tradition on the fragment which has tended to focus
on the fragment’s (ruined) form and (incomplete) content.
It is
shown that
where
the critical discourse on the fragment distinguishes between extracting
the part (fragmentum) from the whole (the body of fragmenti
as a consequence of breaking), the fragment as a text in its own right
does not always obey the will-to-completion imposed upon the fragment
as a remnant. That is to say, where the fragment in critical discourse
most often becomes the object of definitions of incompleteness,
ruin, residue, the fragment as such seems to enjoy the status of being,
existing independent of formal concerns.
Further,
it is
argued
that any survey of the history of the fragment must begin with a basic
distinction between the fragment as a text in its own right (the
literary history of the fragment) and the meta-text on the fragment
(the history of the critical discourse on the fragment). The premise
for this claim is the assumption that any survey of the fragment as
text must be concerned with the form and content of the fragment, while
a consideration of the fragment in metatextual discourse must be
concerned with function. That is to say, whereas the literary history
of the fragment deals with oppositions such as fragment/totality,
part/whole, the critical discourse on the fragment deals with
oppositions such as fragment/fragmentary, genre/poetics (in this work
‘poetics’ and ‘aesthetics’ are used interchangeably to designate a
system, of descriptive or prescriptive nature, of formal and/or
stylistic features particularly characteristic of a work or set of
works). Furthermore, it is established that while the fragment as text
can be traced in all periods, the critical discourse on the fragment
only begins as an independent manifestation with the German romantics
around 1800.
The central
contention
of this book is that one needs to shift the focus from formal
concerns, which is marked in critical discourse by the preoccupation
with the form/content, part/whole properties of the fragment, to a more
pragmatic approach in which the fragment in both its modes of being
and becoming is defined in terms of its functionality. The
function of the fragment, it is argued further, must be seen as various
types of performativity, either in the act of writing or the act of
(critical) reading of the fragment.
The analytic
scope of
the work is to present readings of two types of texts: a) (literary)
fragments (from different periods) as texts in their own right (the
first order of object texts in this book), and b) the growing
body of critical discourse on the fragment as literary genre, i.e. what
is usually presented as metatext on the fragment (here functioning as
object texts of the second order in the book). This dual focus
is necessary to capture the slippage between literary texts and recent
critical discourse which tends to mimic the form of the fragment. Thus
there are two historical concerns in the book: one which can be
referred to as the literary history of the fragment and another which
can be referred to as the critical discourse on the fragment and its
history. Due to space limitations, the book does not presume to
present a comprehensive history of either the development of the
fragment in its own right or the critical discourse on the fragment.
Rather, it focusses on select instances in which the fragment’s modes
of being as such, and becoming are most evident, and
consequently there are lacunae between the historical periods dealt
with.
Looking first
at
the
history of the critical discourse on the fragment, it is shown how the
fragment is habitually defined, not as an object in itself, but in
relation to notions of either the period or aesthetics/genre in which
it appears. Thus, fragments are named by historians and theorists as
"Ancient", "Romantic", "Modern", "Postmodern" (period terms), or
"Philosophical" or "Literary" (aesthetic or generic terms). These
labels do not make a clear distinction between formal features of the
fragment in terms of the form/content dichotomy, which is criticised
and sought replaced by a more rewarding alternative, namely to focus on
the function of the fragment (seen as its performativity), as well as
on the performative aspects of the critical discourse on the fragment.
The book thus poses the question: what is a fragment when it is
not a matter of form or content but a question of function, a
philosophical concept, a manifestation of a theory, or a self-labelled
"thought"?
In the
literary
history of the fragment, as well as in its critical history, a number
of questions are raised: what constitutes the fragment, when the
fragment can only be defined a posteriori? Does the fragment
begin on its own (i.e. with its inception or moment of being written,
which would indicate that it can have an agency of its own, i.e. it is),
or is it begun by others, writers and critics alike (which would point
to its being constructed by an outside agency, i.e. it becomes)?
Does it acquire a name of its own, or is it labelled by others? All
these questions revolve around issues of agency, and it is shown that
they can only be resolved in terms of performativity. The book
argues that engaging with performativity means seeing fragments as
acts: acts of literature, acts of reading, acts of writing. It is
further suggested that the fragment is performative when it exhibits an
agency of its own, as in the self-reflective writing which recognizes
in itself the writer’s experience of contradiction. The term
"performative" is employed whenever there is a case in which
determining the fragment’s constitution relies on an act of identifying
function with practice (such as when postmodern writers choose to
imitate in their writing the aesthetics of the fragment itself) against
the will-to-form of the fragment. In other words, performativity
expresses a challenging of any name given to the fragment which seems
to be beyond challenge (such as is the case with the aphorism, for
example). Moreover, performativity explains the difference not only
between the fragment’s names according to their historical context
(ancient, romantic, etc) or the lack thereof (fragment as
ruin), but also between the different traits that the fragment
characterize by categorizing it, such as the fragmentary, the
incomplete, the unplanned, etc.
The main
research
interest of the book lies with the most recent manifestations
of the fragment, that is to say the fragments which are engaged in becoming
through the labelling performed in critical discourse. It is shown to
be necessary to understand that these labels are generic, they form a
poetics, highlight an aesthetic, and therefore their function is
representational, as they foreground the fragment’s textuality. These
labels designate genres in terms of function (as epigraphs, epigrams,
epitaphs etc.)
The book
proposes a taxonomy of 10 different types of fragment, which goes
against the idea that a fragment a) only exists insofar as it
originates in a ‘whole’ text, whose loss of totality is marked by such
words as incomplete, inconclusive, inconsequential; (for example, the
text as a ruin as in the found fragments of Heraclitus), or b) only
exists as a construction whose constitution is labelled by such words
as unfinished, unstable, uncountable (for example, a constructed ruin,
such as an aphorism, or Coleridge’s "Kubla Khan")
Insofar as
the
fragment exhibits a manifestation of either a state of being,
(when the fragment simply exists as a text in its own right throughout
history (meaning that the fragment is)), or a state of becoming
(when the fragment becomes something else by being theorized in
critical discourse), it is proposed that one can divide the ten types
of fragment into two groups, highlighting the tension between the
fragment’s manifestation of being/becoming and addressing the question
of the fragment’s performativity in terms of function. It is argued
that the first five types, here called coercive, consensual, redundant,
repetitive and resolute, are labels which point to agency (in Part I
of this work). The latter five types of fragments, here called
ekphrastic, epigrammatic, epigraphic, emblematic, and epitaphic are
shown to point to fragments’ representational functions (Part II).
The book
claims that the types of fragment in Part I, which is
diachronically organized, address the question of the fragment’s
historical constitution as being, whereas the types of
fragments in Part II, which has a synchronic focus on
postmodern fragments, address the question of the aesthetic difference
between the fragment (form) and the fragmentary (content), where the
form/content dichotomy is interactive with the fragment’s constitution
as becoming. Whereas the fragments in Part I exhibit a
latent performativity, the fragments in Part II, the postmodern
fragments, exhibit a manifest performativity.
Thus,
methodologically
speaking, the project is organized according to the grid concept: Along
a horizontal axis it follows chronologically instances in the
construction of the fragment through the periods commonly identified as
ancient, romantic, modern, and postmodern (one instance of the
postmodern fragment is seen against the background of the baroque). The
vertical axis, which cuts across historicity, represents the poetics of
the fragment, which means that this axis distinguishes between
genre-labels of various fragments and transformations within aesthetic
systems constructed by critics. Thus the book creates a full
performative poetics of the fragment itself through its literary
history, as well as of the critical discourse on the fragment,
especially in poststructuralist, deconstructive theory which tends
towards a fragmentary style itself.
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