Paralipsis

[Dave Monroe]

paralipsis

 par-a-lip'-sis  from Gk. para, "side" and leipein, "to leave"
("to leave to one side")
Also sp. paraleipsis, paralepsis
antiphrasis, parasiopesis
occultatio, occupatio,
praeteritio, preteritio, praetermissio
the passager, preterition

Stating and drawing attention to something in the very act of
pretending to pass it over. A kind of irony.

http://rhetoric.byu.edu/figures/P/paralipsis.htm

Source: WordNet (r) 1.7

paralipsis
     n : suggesting by deliberately concise treatment that much of
significance is omitted [syn: paralepsis, paraleipsis, preterition]

Source: Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913)

Paralipsis \Par`a*lip"sis\, n. [NL.]
   See Paraleipsis.
Paraleipsis \Par`a*leip"sis\, n. [NL., fr. Gr. ?, fr. ? to leave on
one side, to omit; ? beside + ? to leave.] (Rhet.)
   A pretended or apparent omission; a figure by which a speaker
artfully pretends to pass by what he really mentions; as, for example,
if an orator should say, ``I do not speak of my adversary's scandalous
venality and rapacity, his brutal conduct, his treachery and malice.''
[Written also paralepsis, paralepsy, paralipsis.]

http://dictionary.die.net/paralipsis

PARALIPSIS/ˌpærəˈlɪpsɪs/

A rhetorical device.

There are so many technical terms in rhetoric — aporia, hypallage,
paraprosdokian, and zeugma are just a few — that I need to look them
up every time because I can’t keep them in mind. (If I had wanted to
learn a stack of weird names, I’d have taken up botany.) Paralipsis is
a kind of irony, a rhetorical trick by which the speaker or writer
emphasises something by professing to ignore it. Key phrases that give
you the clue to an approaching paralipsis include “not to mention”,
“to say nothing of”, “leaving aside”, “without considering”, and “far
be it from me to mention”. Some examples may make this clearer: “Far
be it from me to mention Mr Smith’s many infidelities”; “It would be
unseemly for me to dwell on the man’s drinking problem”, “I will not
speak of her unsavoury past”, “I surely need not remind you to get
your Christmas shopping done early”. You get the idea. It’s from Greek
paraleipsis, passing over. The device goes around under several
aliases, being also known as paraleipsis, paralepsis, preterition, and
occupatio. Some writers argue that it’s the same thing as apophasis.
They may say that: I couldn’t possibly comment.

http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-par3.htm

Paralipsis, also known as praeteritio, preterition, cataphasis,
antiphrasis, or parasiopesis, is a rhetorical figure of speech wherein
the speaker or writer invokes a subject by denying that it should be
invoked. As such, it can be seen as a rhetorical relative of irony.
Paralipsis is usually employed to make a subversive ad hominem attack.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophasis#Paralipsis

preterition

SYLLABICATION: pret·er·i·tion
NOUN: 1. The act of passing by, disregarding, or omitting. 2. Law
Neglect of a testator to mention a legal heir in his or her will. 3.
Christianity The Calvinist doctrine that God neglected to designate
those who would be damned, positively determining only the elect.
ETYMOLOGY: Late Latin praeteriti, praeteritin-, a passing over, from
Latin praeteritus, past participle of praeterre, to go by....

http://www.bartleby.com/61/71/P0547100.html

Cf. (?) ....

Edgar Allan Poe, "The Purloined Letter" (1845) ...

   "No sooner had I glanced at this letter, than I concluded it to be
that of which I was in search. To be sure, it was, to all appearance,
radically different from the one of which the Prefect had read us so
minute a description.... these things, together with the
hyper-obtrusive situation of this document, full in the view of every
visitor, and thus exactly in accordance with the conclusions to which
I had previously arrived; these things, I say, were strongly
corroborative of suspicion, in one who came with the intention to
suspect."

http://www.eapoe.org/works/tales/plttrb.htm
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/POE/purloine.html

Jorge Luis Borges, "The Argentine Writer and Tradition" (1934) ...

   "Gibbon observes that in the Arabian book par excellence, in the
Koran, there are no camels; I believe if there were any doubt as to
the authenticity of the Koran, this absence of camels would be
sufficient to prove it is an Arabian work.  It was written by
Mohammed, and Mohammed, as an Arab, had no reason to know that camels
were especially Arabian; for him they were a part of reality, he had
no reason to emphasize them; on the other hand, the first thing a
falsifier, a tourist, an Arab nationalist would do is have a surfeit
of camels, caravans of camels, on every page; but Mohammed, as an
Arab, was unconcerned: he knew he could be an Arab without camels."

http://www.themodernword.com/borges/borges_quotes.html
http://muse.tau.ac.il/maslool/intro-contracted.html

"Merely train's hardware for any casual onlooker, Waldetar in private
life was exactly this mist of philosophy, imagination and continual
worry over his several relationships--not only with God, but also with
Nita, with their children, with his own history. There's no organized
effort about it but there remains a grand joke on all visitors to
Baedeker's world: the permanent residents are actually humans in
disguise." (V., Ch. 3, p. 78--thanks, Tore!)

   "'Ev'rywhere they've sent us,-- the Cape, St. Helena, America,--
what's the Element common to all?'
   "'Long Voyages by Sea,' replies Mason, blinking in Exhaustion by
now chronick.  'Was there anything else?'
   "'Slaves.  Ev'ry day at the Cape, we lived with Slavery in our
faces ..." (M&D, Ch. 71, pp. 692-3)

   "'Perhaps its familiarity,' Randolph suggested plaintively,
'rendered it temporarily invisible to you.'"   (ATD Pt.I, p. 4)

>From Pierre-Yves Petillon, "A Re-cognition of Her Errand into the
Wilderness," New Essays on The Crying of Lot 49, ed. Patrick O'Donnell
(New York: Cambridge UP, 1991), pp. 127-70 ...

   "As The Crying of Lot 49 nears its end, the Tristero, which has
been looming up all along, comes dangerously close to losing the
teasing epistemological uncertainty it has retained thus far in the
novel.  As Oedipa stumbles along a railroad track ... she remembers
things she would have seen 'if only she had looked' (179) ....

[...]

   "The Tristero underground has so far been implied to be a motley
crew of eccentrics and bohemian drop-outs, an archipelago of
'isolates' having 'withdrawn' from the Republic, a lunatic fringe in
tatters.  But suddenly, in this last rhetorical leap, the Tristero
broadens its scope to include, in a grand, almost liturgical gesture,
all the outcasts of American history....  By the end of the novel the
Tristero, shadowy as it still remains, is no longer a ghostly
underground (perhaps entirely phantasmatic) but a real, 'embattled'
underground about to come out of the shadows.  No longer hovering on
the edge as a cryptic plot, the 'Other' that the Tristero has thus far
represented is almost revealed as a version of 'the other America'
that Michael Harrington described....  This America is 'the America of
poverty,' 'hidden today in a way it never was before,' 'dispossesed,'
'living on the fringes, the margin,' as 'internal exiles.'
   "Looking back on the novel from the perspective of its finale, it
could almost be viewed as a New Deal novel, concerned with  gathering
back into the American fold a 'third world' previouly excluded...."
(pp. 149-50)

... and from Peter Knight, Conspiracy Culture: From Kennedy to the
X-Files (New York: Routledge, 2000), Chapter 1, "Conspiracy/Culture,"
Section II, "Vineland and Visibility," pp. 57-75 ...

"The hidden depths and concelaed realms which might encourage
countercultural fantasies of a conspiratorial 'We-system' (as
Gravity's Rainbow termed it) have thus all but disappeared in the
world of Vineland.  Everything has become exposed (to use a film
metaphor to which the novel itself is highly attuned) ....  On this
reading, then, the final failure of the 1960s underground culture
comes about not through any of the conspiratorial fanstasies of
apocalypse which the counterculture predicted, but were left to hide.
Everything is visible, and everything is connected, producing a
situation in which a routine sense of paranoia is paradoxically both
no longer necessary, and more vital than ever." (p. 73)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0208&msg=69706

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0701&msg=114275