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Literary fragment

Summary

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, or lack of a traditional narrative structure.[1]

Vanessa Guignery and Wojciech Drag note that while it is difficult to classify literary fragments, a number of critics agree on a basic taxonomy of two types of fragment: those “whose fragmentation is the result of the author’s conception” and those that are “incomplete for other reasons, such as the writer’s inability to finish them or the loss of some of its parts over time.”[1]

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

Criticism and Theory edit

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.[2] Guignery and Drag write that the task of defining the literary fragment is “near-impossible”.[3] Sophie Thomas writes that literary fragments “disturb characterization”, as they exist somewhere between a part and a whole but do not belong to either.[4] 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.[5]

Baltussen and Olson have noted that 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.[6]

Antiquity edit

Historical literary fragments have been of interest to scholars in many fields since at least the sixteenth century, and have formed the research basis of many fields since the establishment of academic disciplines in the nineteenth century.[7]  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.[7]

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 from works that have never been found, such as in the work of Heraclitus.[2]

Notable examples edit

The Romantic Period edit

The fragment as both theme and form is strongly associated with European Romanticism.[8]  While the Romantic fragment evolved out of the much earlier writings of Montaigne, Pascal and the English and French moralist tradition,[9]scholars such as Ann Janowitz and Vanessa Guignery note that the fragmentary form was established by a group of German writers associated with the Jena school including Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis.[2] 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.[10] According to Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Lebarthe, the Romantic “aims at fragmentation for its own sake”.[11]

William Tronzo writes that 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".[12]

Ann Janowitz notes that 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.[10]

Notable examples edit

Coleridge, Kubla Khan; or a Vision in a Dream. A Fragment

Keats, Hyperion. A Fragment

Byron, The Giaour, A Fragment of a Turkish Tale

Shelley, The Triumph of Life



See also edit

References edit

  1. ^ a b c Guignery, Vanessa; Drag, Wojciech Drag (2019). The Poetics of Fragmentation in Contemporary British and American Fiction. Delaware: Vernon Press. pp. xvii.
  2. ^ a b c Elias, Camelia (2004). The Fragment: Towards a History and Poetics of a Performative Genre. Harvard: Peter Lang. p. 3.
  3. ^ Guignery, Vanessa (2019). The Poetics of Fragmentation in Contemporary British and American Fiction. Delaware: Vernon Press. pp. xviii.
  4. ^ Thomas, Sophie (2005). "The Fragment". In Roe, Nicholas (ed.). Romanticism. Oxford Academic. pp. 511–512.
  5. ^ Frey, Hans-Jost (1996). Interruptions. State University of New York Press. p. 25.
  6. ^ Baltussen, Han; Olson, S. Douglas (2017). "Epilogue: A Conversation on Fragments". Journal of Juristic Papyrology. 30: 393–406.
  7. ^ a b Duba, William; Flüeler, Christoph (2018). "Fragments and fragmentology". Fragmentology. 1: 1–5.
  8. ^ Sandford, Stella (2016). "The dream is a fragment: Freud, transdisciplinarity and early German Romanticism". Radical Philosophy. 198: 25.
  9. ^ Gasche, Rodolphe (1991). "Foreword: Ideality in Fragmentation". In Schlegel, Friedrich; Firchow, Peter; Gasche, Rodolphe (eds.). Philosophical Fragments. University of Minnesota Press.
  10. ^ a b Janowitz, Ann (2017). "The Romantic Fragment". In Wu, Duncan (ed.). A Companion to Romanticism. Oxford: Blackwell. p. 479.
  11. ^ 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.
  12. ^ Tronzo, William (2009). The Fragment: An Incomplete History. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute. p. 16.