In November, Princeton University Press published The Chapter: A Segmented History from Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century by Nicholas Dames, a professor of humanities at Columbia University.
We may be accustomed to the fact that many books are divided into chapters.But why the chapter?To answer this question, Dames embarked on a journey of historical retrospective spanning 2,000 years.
Dames first introduced the textual compilations of the ancient Roman period, when the form of "chapters" had evolved to help organize information.He then discusses the earliest gospels and the ways in which medieval romance novels were segmented, describing how chapters were applied to later chapters of narrative texts, and how narrative segmentation led to a series of aesthetic techniques.
Dames says the text evolved slowly over the course of 2000 with stylistic changes and advances in publishing technology.At first, it was a means to help readers find information in compilation texts, and then it gradually became a method of creating a sense of time in narratives.Dames is an expert in the history and theory of fiction, having published a book, The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction, at Oxford University Press in 2007.Thus, in Chapter, he draws on his expertise to examine "how an ancient means of editing became a universally recognized element of narrative art."Thus, he transformed the text into an object of literary analysis and cultural history.
In the course of describing the function of the text, he shared an in-depth interpretation of the works of some famous figures in the history of world literature.Among the characters and works he analyzed were the English novelist Stern, the German writer Goethe, the Russian writer Tolstoy, the English writer Dickens, the British writer Eliot, the Brazilian writer Machado de Assis, and the British novelist B.S. Johnson, French screenwriter Agnes Valda, German writer Uvie Johansson, American writer Jennifer Egan, Hungarian writer Krausnauholcoy Laszlo, and others.
For thousands of years, various text units with different and very different functions have been called "chapters".Dames declined to give a strict definition of "chapter" to determine the scope of the book's discussion.He believes that ambiguity is embedded in the evolution of the text."A fundamental feature of the evolution of the text is the continuous movement towards functional harmlessness, in fact towards a persistence: adherence to its own ambiguity, flexibility and resistance to any ostentation."A text not only appears superficial, uncertain, and unspoken, but it is in fact superficial, uncertain, and unspoken.Like the catalogue and the preface, the text is external to the text itself.
Dames pointed out that "a text is a textual segmentation that has the effect of expressing time."It expresses time, first because it is a unit in the preceding sequence, and second because it is an interrupt that breaks continuity.It gives the reader a "time experience that is organized into flexible but regular units."A text is a breakpoint in a text, a crack in sequential reading, but this crack is closely linked to the resumption of reading.The meaning of the text setting is to give a time dimension to our reading experience.Chapters, he says, in implicit or explicit ways become an indicator of the times, a silent but enduring feature of modernity.
Dames presents a variety of forms of the text, from ancient clay tablets and sheepskin scrolls to contemporary novels and films.In conclusion, the author unfamiliarizes the way in which we are accustomed to combining the text once again, vividly traces its evolution and tells us how this multi-purpose way of dividing the narrative sculpts our experience of time.
Commenting on the book, Catherine Gallagher, professor of English literature at the University of California, Berkeley, notes that the book emphasizes another "chapter time" that creates a useful tension with the time involved in narrative work and the time the writer narrates.So, is a textual trace of the reader's time and nothing to do with every aspect of the narrative?Literary critics and scholars have much to gain by conceiving a text as an experience of time.It also helps us redefine the reader: the reader is both a "function" of the text and a constant reminder of the passage of time outside the text.