chiasma

Joudah exploits the fuzziness of language from the outset, toying with false chiasms and faux epigrams like "the falafel of truth / and the truth of falafel." Bathetic, ironic, and obscure by turns, the books first section complicates the "common" with roundabout epithets like "the grackle, common, / indigo, icteric-eyed New World // passerine." Associations that hinge on sonic rather than semiotic connections ("not chasm but chiasm") and moments of ambiguous syntax foreground words as words, functioning originally in their "status as feeling." The question of origins, too, recurs throughout Footnotes.

From the fluid and affective conjoining of these various chiasms, these multiple and connected opsigns and sonsigns, viewers viscerally sense "the coiling over of the visible upon the seeing body."

The development towards this complex and multi-leveled concept is carried forward through the analysis of the three chiasms which Weinman sees as central to Woolf's representation of the crisis of the subject, insofar as they point "to the impossibility of stable subjectivity" (23) The dynamics originating from the model of the chiasmus, with its relations of "mutual interdependence" (14), further clarifies the author's talent for investigations which attempt to go beyond given dichotomies and definitions to propose more integrated views of central issues such as the formation of individuality and its relation to body and language.

Sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, section by section, Heil connects words and phrases to detect chiasms throughout Hebrews.

had already shown his "chiastic hand." He now examines the letter "through the lens of worship," relentlessly pursuing chiasms and constantly paraphrasing the text.

"Reading Chiasms." Of Minimal Things: Studies on the Notion of Relation.

* Free book on CD: "The Bible as Literature: A Study of Hebrew Poetry." Emphasis is on repetitions, parallelisms, brackets, chiasms. NT examples included.

Simple chiasms are common in many languages, and even though the layperson may not be familiar with the term chiasmus, the wordplay is easily recognized: "Ajax, who wears his wit in his belly and his guts in his head" (Tro 2.1.73-4).

Consequently, we cannot speak about tautology and one single chiastic transformation, but the relation between the two figures is unfolded in an 'infinite' number of chiasms. Since both of them function as a swinging mirror, playing them off (8) and turning them against each other, the two mirrors will reflect each other ad infinitum.