Paralipsis

[Clément Lévy]

Paralipsis is precisely what we call prétérition in French! We don't  
use the Greek word for it!
Clem
Le 22 avr. 09 à 19:35, Dave Monroe a écrit :

> 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
>