The Fragment

Aboard a long-range research vessel, in the vast reaches of the South Pacific, the cast and crew of the reality show Sealife believe they have found a ratings bonanza. For a director dying for drama, a distress call from Henders Island—a mere blip on any radar—might be just the ticket. Until the first scientist sets foot on Henders—and the ultimate test of survival begins. For when they reach the island’s shores, the scientists are utterly unprepared for what they find—creatures unlike any ever recorded in natural history. This is not a lost world frozen in time; this is Earth as it might have looked after evolving on a separate path for half a billion years—a fragment of a lost continent, with an ecosystem that could topple ours like a house of cards.

The universe may well have begun with an immense act of fragmentation, "the big bang," that sent particles flying in all directions to perform spectacular acts of creation and destruction. The fragment, volatile and unpredictable, is not simply the static part of a once-whole thing but itself something in motion. Drawing upon art history, archaeology, literature, numismatics, philosophy, and film, this book explores the significance of the fragment and addresses the powerful drives that have impelled it into the cultural mainstream. Book jacket.

The majority of medieval and sixteenth-century Iberian manuscripts, whether in Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, Spanish, or Aljamiado (Spanish written in Arabic script), contain fragments or are fragments. The term fragment is used to describe not only isolated bits of manuscript material with a damaged appearance, but also any piece of a larger text that was intended to be a fragment. Investigating the vital role these fragments played in medieval and early modern Iberian manuscript culture, Heather Bamford’s Cultures of the Fragment is focused on fragments from five major Iberian literary traditions, including Hispano-Arabic and Hispano-Hebrew poetry, Latin and Castilian epics, chivalric romances, and the literature of early modern crypto-Muslims. The author argues that while some manuscript fragments came about by accident, many were actually created on purpose and used in a number of ways, from binding materials, to anthology excerpts, and some fragments were even incorporated into sacred objects as messages of good luck. Examining four main motifs of fragmentation, including intention, physical appearance, metonymy, and performance, this work reveals the centrality of the fragment to manuscript studies, highlighting the significance of the fragment to Iberia’s multicultural and multilingual manuscript culture.

Rather than solid frames, some less than perfect aesthetic objects have permeable membranes which allow them to diffuse effortlessly into the everyday world. In the parallel universes of music and literature, Linda Cummins extols the poetry of such imperfection. She places Debussy's work within a tradition thriving on anti-Aristotelian principles: motley collections, crumbling ruins real or fake, monstrous hybrids, patchwork and palimpsest, hasty sketches, ellipses, truncated beginnings and endings, meandering arabesques, irrelevant digressions, auto-quotations. Sensitive to the intermittences of memory and experience and with a keen ear for ironic intrusion, Cummins draws the reader into the Western cultural past in search of the surprisingly ubiquitous aesthetic of the unfinished, negatively silhouetted against expectations of rational coherence. Theories popularized by Schlegel and embraced by the French Symbolists are only the first waypoint on an elaborately illustrated tour reaching back to Petrarch. Cummins meticulously applies the derived results to Debussy's scores and finds convincing correlations in this chiasmatic crossover.

This monograph is an interdisciplinary study of the concept of 'fragment' in literature and in critical and literary theory. It discusses the fragment's performativity and function within a historical perspective, stretching from Heraclitus, via the German Romantics and European writers of the Modernist period, to American postmodern manifestations of the fragment. This is the first history of the fragment to appear in English, and it is also the first attempt at producing a consistent taxonomy of literary and critical fragments. The fragments are categorised according to function, not author intention, and the study addresses a number of questions: What constitutes the fragment, when the fragment can only be defined a posteriori? Does the fragment begin on its own, or is it begun by others, writers and critics? Does it acquire a name of its own, or is it labelled by others? All these questions revolve around issues of agency, and they are best discussed in terms of performativity, which means seeing fragments as acts: acts of literature, acts of reading, acts of writing. The book demonstrates how a poetics of the fragment as a performative genre can be created, situating the fragment both as literature and as a phenomenon within postmodern criticism against the background of philosophy, art history, and theology.

The fragment poem, long regarded as a peculiarly Romantic phenomenon, has never been examined outside the context of thematic and biographical criticism. By submitting the unfinished poems of the English Romantics to both a genetic investigation and a reception study, Marjorie Levinson defines the fragment's formal character at various moments in its historical career. She suggests that the formal determinancy of these works, hence their expressive or semantic affinities, is a function of historical conditions and projections. The English Romantic fragment poems share not so much a particular mode of production as a myth of production. Levinson pries apart these two dimensions and analyzes each independently to consider their relationship. By reconstructing the contemporary reception of such works as Wordsworth's "Nutting," Coleridge's "Christabel" and "Kubla Khan," Shelley's "Julian and Maddalo," and Keats's Hyperion fragments, and juxtaposing this model against dominant twentieth-century critical paradigms, Levinson discriminates layers, phases, and kinds of intentionality in the poems and considers the ideological implications of this diversity. This study is the first to investigate the English Romantic fragment poem by identifying the assumptions -- contemporary and belated -- that govern interpretative procedures. In a substantial summary chapter, Levinson reflects upon the meaning and effects of these assumptions with respect to the facts and fictions of literary production in the period and to the processes of canon formation. Originally published in 1986. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

This volume offers an introduction, critical edition, and fresh English translation of the Muratorian Fragment. In addition to addressing questions of authorship, date, provenance, and sources, Clare K. Rothschild carefully analyzes the text's language, composition, genre, and possible functions with reference to a breathtaking range of scholarly positions and findings from the eighteenth century to the present. She also investigates its position within the eclectic eighth-century Muratorian Codex (Ambr. I 101 sup.). A line-by-line philological commentary draws attention to literary, philosophical, and religious aspects of the individual traditions represented. This study should be of interest to scholars of the New Testament and early Christian literature, as well as experts on the emergence of the canon and historians of the Latin Medieval West.