Nicholas Dames · 2023 · EPUB · Calibre ID 11289
Resurfaced in Point, Pause, Chapter (2026-09-28).
Role in the triad
The chapter: the largest regular cut as a technology of lived time; Sterne’s staircase as the image of the break.
Why this book
Answers Szendy without the violence (‘traversable’ ruptures) and shares ground with Parkes in the early history of kephalaia and capitula. Puts gesture at the break (‘The break occurs midgesture’). Table 3.1 charted.
Quotations
Verified against the book’s own text on the day of the reading.
- “This is a book about ruptures. But traversable ones: gaps one crosses, fissures within continuities, the marks within an individual life.” (Ante Chapter, p. 3)
- “Where that unit is not already marked or summarized, it can be summoned into being by the reader’s own gestures.” (ch. 2, p. 63)
- “the kephalaia are not unities but instead incitations” (ch. 3, p. 92)
- “For Locke, chapters are the artifacts of communal approaches: citation, proscribed ritual segmentation, numbing serial interruptions.” (ch. 5, p. 149)
- “The break occurs midgesture” (ch. 5, p. 161)
- “The chapter is a pause on a step or landing, a continuing motion or gesture caught midway, the awkwardness of stopping somewhere one is meant to keep traversing.” (ch. 5, p. 163)
- “Our comprehension of time is continually and inescapably punctuated and divided, not only in retrospect but in the very moments of its formation.” (Post Chapter, p. 290)
Themes
capitulation · chapter · gesture · kephalaia · narrative time · segmentation · Sterne · the novel