Chiasmus and Culture

Description

e essays in this volume are concerned with chiastic inversion, and its place in social interactions, cultural creation and, more generally, human thought and experience. ey explore from a variety of angles what the unsettling logic of chiasmus has to tell us about the world, human relations, cultural patterns, psychology, and artistic and poetic creation. ey treat chiasmus not only as a gure of speech, but as a generative principle, an aesthetic idea, a method of composition, a tool of ideological manipulation, a matrix of social interaction, a philosophical problem, a metaphor, an elemental image or sign. At many points they engage in dialogue with one another as well as with key thinkers and authors who have written about or under the inspiration of chiastic logic. 1. From Stasis to Ékstasis: Four Types of Chiasmus 19 Anthony Paul 2. What is a Chiasmus? Or, Why the Abyss Stares Back 45 Robert Hariman 3. Chiasmus and Metaphor 69 Ivo Strecker 4. Chiasm in Merleau-Ponty: Metaphor or Concept? 91 Isabelle Thomas-Fogiel 5. Chiasmi Figuring Difference 116 Stephen Tyler 6. Forking: Rhetoric χ Rhetoric 124 Philippe-Joseph Salazar 7. Chiasm in Suspense in Psychoanalysis 143 Alain Vanier 8. Quotidian Chiasmus in Montaigne: Arguing Impotence and Suicide 148 Phillip John Usher 9. Travestis, Michês and Chiasmus: Crossing and Cross-Dressing in the Work of Néstor Perlongher 161 Ben Bollig 10. Parallelism and Chiasmus in Ritual Oration and Ostension in Tana Wai Brama, Eastern Indonesia 187 E. Douglas Lewis 11. Chiasmus, Mythical Creation and H.C. Andersen’s ‘ e Shadow’ 219 Boris Wiseman, followed by a ‘Response’ from Lucien Scubla