Meaning of bathmology | Babel Free

Definitions

The science/study of the interplay of "degrees" - or, levels of linguistic self-referentiality - in discourse

uncountable

Equivalents

Examples

“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.”

CEFR level