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A Literary fragment is a piece of text that may be part of a larger work, or that employs a ‘fragmentary’ form characterised by physical features such as short paragraphs or sentences separated by white space, and thematic features such as discontinuity, ambivalence, or lack of a traditional narrative structure.[1]

Vanessa Guignery and Wojciech Drag note that while it is difficult to classify literary fragments, a number of critics agree on a basic taxonomy of two types of fragment: those “whose fragmentation is the result of the author’s conception” and those that are “incomplete for other reasons, such as the writer’s inability to finish them or the loss of some of its parts over time.”[1]

As a form, the literary fragment has been employed during different literary periods as a way to reckon with the challenges of modernity.[1]

Criticism and Theory[edit]

The literary fragment and the concept of fragmentariness presents several challenges to literary criticism, in part because of the difficulty in determining what constitutes a fragment.[2] Guignery and Drag write that the task of defining the literary fragment is “near-impossible”.[3] Sophie Thomas writes that literary fragments “disturb characterization”, as they exist somewhere between a part and a whole but do not belong to either.[4] Others, such as Hans-Jost Frey, suggest that the fragment may be entirely incompatible with literary theory because it is by nature “hostile to meaning,” and defies the boundaries and borders upon which theory depends.[5]

Baltussen and Olson have noted that the difficulty in defining the literary fragment is also due to the connotations of the word ‘fragment’ and its relationship to archaeology; while a fragment of pottery can suggest the part that was lost due to the nature of patterning, the literary fragment cannot represent its whole in the same way, which complicates the relationship between the literary fragment and its suggested whole.[6]

Antiquity[edit]

Historical literary fragments have been of interest to scholars in many fields since at least the sixteenth century, and have formed the research basis of many fields since the establishment of academic disciplines in the nineteenth century.[7]  Historical literary fragments are studied closely in the fields of papyrology, which involves the study of papyrus texts almost all preserved in fragments, and the more recently established field of fragmentology, which involves the study of surviving fragments of mostly medieval European manuscripts.[7]

Historical literary fragments include the remains of works otherwise lost over time, such as in the case of the poetry of Sappho, as well as quotations from works that have never been found, such as in the work of Heraclitus.[2]

Notable examples[edit]

The Romantic Period[edit]

The fragment as both theme and form is strongly associated with European Romanticism.[8]  While the Romantic fragment evolved out of the much earlier writings of Montaigne, Pascal and the English and French moralist tradition,[9]scholars such as Ann Janowitz and Vanessa Guignery note that the fragmentary form was established by a group of German writers associated with the Jena school including Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis.[2] The Jena Romantics, as well as Goethe, Nietzsche, Schiller and Walter Benjamin, saw the fragment as a literary form that offered freedom from the limitations imposed by traditional genres, had the potential to reject Enlightenment ways of thinking, and could reflect the fragmentary nature of existence while gesturing towards the future.[10] According to Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Lebarthe, the Romantic “aims at fragmentation for its own sake”.[11]

William Tronzo writes that this idea is also reflected in the work of the English late-Romantic poets who saw the potential of the fragmented form to express insights "that went beyond established forms and genres".[12]

Ann Janowitz notes that the historical fragment and the motif of the historical ruin also gained popularity during this period, with many writers taking inspiration from recently discovered relics of the past. This interest in historical fragments saw several literary hoaxes in which Romantic writers including Thomas Chatterton and James Macpherson claimed to have translated or discovered historical fragments that were later shown to be their own modern creation.[10]

Notable examples[edit]

The Modernist Period[edit]

The use of the fragment as a form is closely linked to the modernist literary tradition.[13] As Nora Golschmidt explains, "the fragment is so integral to the literary and visual cultures of modernism that it borders on cliche."[14]

Guignery and Drag explain that while the modernist literary movement is often described as being a repudiation of earlier ideas, modernist fragmentary writing was a clear response to the Romantic fragment poem.[15] While the Romantics saw the fragment as a way to reckon with ideas of possibility and limitlessness, the fragment that appeared during this period in the first half of the twentieth century was a response to the challenges of modernity.[14] As John Tytell explains, the fragment became synonymous with literary modernism because it represented "a new sense of the universe that began to emerge as the nineteenth century ended".[16] Industrialisation, technological advancement and developments in science all lead to significant societal changes, and the First World War "seemed to sever any reliable continuities with the values of the past," leading to a "fragmented experience of modernity".[14] These changes prompted writers to seek a new mode of representation that could represent the complexity of the modern world.

According to Gasiorek, the modernist period saw the literary fragment become part of the novel, the genre previously considered the least consistent with fragmentation. He explains that the modernists adopted the fragment as a rejection of realism that was seen as an “unwarrantedly stable and epistemologically confident narrative mode,” and instead,

developed novelistic  forms  that  were  fragmented,  deployed  multiple  viewpoints,  emphasised  the  subjective  nature  of  experience, disrupted narrative chronology, drew attention to the fictive nature of their narrative procedures, experimented with language, and, by refusing the comforts of closure, remained steadfastly open‐ended.[13]

Notable examples[edit]

See also[edit]

References[edit]

  1. ^ a b c Guignery, Vanessa; Drag, Wojciech Drag (2019). The Poetics of Fragmentation in Contemporary British and American Fiction. Delaware: Vernon Press. pp. xvii.
  2. ^ a b c Elias, Camelia (2004). The Fragment: Towards a History and Poetics of a Performative Genre. Harvard: Peter Lang. p. 3.
  3. ^ Guignery, Vanessa (2019). The Poetics of Fragmentation in Contemporary British and American Fiction. Delaware: Vernon Press. pp. xviii.
  4. ^ Thomas, Sophie (2005). "The Fragment". In Roe, Nicholas (ed.). Romanticism. Oxford Academic. pp. 511–512.
  5. ^ Frey, Hans-Jost (1996). Interruptions. State University of New York Press. p. 25.
  6. ^ Baltussen, Han; Olson, S. Douglas (2017). "Epilogue: A Conversation on Fragments". Journal of Juristic Papyrology. 30: 393–406.
  7. ^ a b Duba, William; Flüeler, Christoph (2018). "Fragments and fragmentology". Fragmentology. 1: 1–5.
  8. ^ Sandford, Stella (2016). "The dream is a fragment: Freud, transdisciplinarity and early German Romanticism". Radical Philosophy. 198: 25.
  9. ^ Gasche, Rodolphe (1991). "Foreword: Ideality in Fragmentation". In Schlegel, Friedrich; Firchow, Peter; Gasche, Rodolphe (eds.). Philosophical Fragments. University of Minnesota Press.
  10. ^ a b Janowitz, Ann (2017). "The Romantic Fragment". In Wu, Duncan (ed.). A Companion to Romanticism. Oxford: Blackwell. p. 479.
  11. ^ Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe; Nancy, Jean-Luc (1988). The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism. Translated by Barnard, P; Lester, C. SUNY Press. p. 41.
  12. ^ Tronzo, William (2009). The Fragment: An Incomplete History. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute. p. 16.
  13. ^ a b Gąsiorek, Andrzej (2015-06-22). A History of Modernist Literature (1 ed.). Wiley. p. 6. doi:10.1002/9781118607305.ch0. ISBN 978-1-4051-7716-0.
  14. ^ a b c Goldschmidt, Nora (2023-12-07), "Introduction", Fragmentary Modernism, Oxford University PressOxford, p. 1, doi:10.1093/oso/9780192863409.003.0001, ISBN 0-19-286340-1, retrieved 2024-04-30
  15. ^ Guignery, Vanessa; Drag, Wojciech (2019). "Introduction: the art of the fragment". In Guignery, Vanessa; Drag, Wojciech (eds.). The Poetics of Fragmentation in Contemporary British and American Fiction. Delaware: Vernon Press. pp. xiv.
  16. ^ Tytell, J (1981). "Epiphany in Chaos: Fragmentation in Modernism". In Krirzman, L. D. (ed.). Fragments: Incompletion and Discontinuity. New York Literary Forum. p. 3.


source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_fragment