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