bathmology
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: 0.00 in modern English
21
Scrabble Score
10
Letters
4
Syllables
9
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
The science/study of the interplay of "degrees" - or, levels of linguistic self-referentiality - in discourse
Uncountable
Example Sentences
- "Every discourse is caught up in the interplay of degrees. We might call this interplay bathmology. A neologism is not superfluous if it gives us the notion of a new science: that of the degrees of language."
- "The qualitative distances separating love, hate, and indifference are what we could learn from a science of degrees, a “bathmology” like the one Barthes dreamed of for the gradations of language."
- "When it addresses itself distinctly to the Young-Girl, the Spectacle is not above a bit of bathmology."
- "While bathmology is not the master key for unlocking the enigma of return, we can think the different positions stake out by the writers in this book as following a trajectory that leads from anti-modernist resumption or rehabilitation (a willful regression that positions itself as a post-critical progression) through 'bathmological' meta-discursive gestures (a critical repetition that changes the meaning of conventions and forms) and finally to spectral poetics which blur the very possibility of defining a clear discursive position or literary self-identity."