The new X, again
Aug. 30th, 2007 10:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thedarkagesColon-laden subtitles in academic books, I think, really started to come into their own in the late eighties or early nineties. I blame this, in large part, on the then-burgeoning theory industry. Surely concepts as large and vague as ingenuity could make them required a little sotto-voce explanation on the cover. There was a sense that the title could be used for fanciful Donne-like catachreses, while the subtitle was where the heavy lifting got done.
The late Murray Krieger, always a great and comparatively unsung harbinger of critical trends, came out with a title that does a one-and-a-half gainer: Ekphrasis : the illusion of the natural sign. He does not win points, though, because "Ekphrasis" is actually what the book is about. More impressive by far is this triple-gainer: Anne Belz's The mirror and the mask : Ekphrasis and the female imaginary : poems and essays. This title has it all: a catachrestic figure before the colon, some kind of explanation after the colon, and, best yet, a second colon, with its little clausula, "poems and essays."
The colon has made its way to non-academic titles over time. In truth, there was already a separate colonic line in fiction, to disambiguate genre. For a particularly fastidious example, take John Gardner's Nickel Mountain: A Pastoral Novel. But in non-fiction, my spotty recollection tells me, the colon didn't make its way into titles until the mid-nineties -- for example, Jared Diamond's Guns, germs, and steel : the fates of human societies.
Now, the colon has done itself one better. It now festoons titles where the part before the colon is significant, and the part after the colon is insignificant. Innumerable books I've seen over the past three years have set out some important phenomenon before the colon, and after it, "The Thing That Changed The World." It's an invariable formula, whether the book's subject is Columbus's discovery of America, wool, or the invention of the carding comb. So, for example, Margaret McMillan's Nixon and Mao: the week that changed the world. Or, Ian Kershaw's Fateful choices : ten decisions that changed the world. Or, the double-coloned Gunpowder : alchemy, bombards, and pyrotechnics : the history of the explosive that changed the world, by Jack Kelly. I think it fair to say, in a non-metaphysical sense, that all things change the world. Some do so incrementally. Some do so in great bursts. But in no case can they all do so to the momentous degree proposed by publishers' marketing departments.
I think it's time to return to simpler titles. One can see what the marketing department was trying to avoid. Reducing Mr. Kelly's book to "Gunpowder," as I would like to do, might not make it clear at whom the book was aimed. "An Introduction to Gunpowder" might give officials at the Department of Homeland Security the wrong idea. Therefore, I propose: "The History and Importance of Gunpowder." This title may not make the book a best-seller, but it does the job without a colon, in five authoritative words.
The late Murray Krieger, always a great and comparatively unsung harbinger of critical trends, came out with a title that does a one-and-a-half gainer: Ekphrasis : the illusion of the natural sign. He does not win points, though, because "Ekphrasis" is actually what the book is about. More impressive by far is this triple-gainer: Anne Belz's The mirror and the mask : Ekphrasis and the female imaginary : poems and essays. This title has it all: a catachrestic figure before the colon, some kind of explanation after the colon, and, best yet, a second colon, with its little clausula, "poems and essays."
The colon has made its way to non-academic titles over time. In truth, there was already a separate colonic line in fiction, to disambiguate genre. For a particularly fastidious example, take John Gardner's Nickel Mountain: A Pastoral Novel. But in non-fiction, my spotty recollection tells me, the colon didn't make its way into titles until the mid-nineties -- for example, Jared Diamond's Guns, germs, and steel : the fates of human societies.
Now, the colon has done itself one better. It now festoons titles where the part before the colon is significant, and the part after the colon is insignificant. Innumerable books I've seen over the past three years have set out some important phenomenon before the colon, and after it, "The Thing That Changed The World." It's an invariable formula, whether the book's subject is Columbus's discovery of America, wool, or the invention of the carding comb. So, for example, Margaret McMillan's Nixon and Mao: the week that changed the world. Or, Ian Kershaw's Fateful choices : ten decisions that changed the world. Or, the double-coloned Gunpowder : alchemy, bombards, and pyrotechnics : the history of the explosive that changed the world, by Jack Kelly. I think it fair to say, in a non-metaphysical sense, that all things change the world. Some do so incrementally. Some do so in great bursts. But in no case can they all do so to the momentous degree proposed by publishers' marketing departments.
I think it's time to return to simpler titles. One can see what the marketing department was trying to avoid. Reducing Mr. Kelly's book to "Gunpowder," as I would like to do, might not make it clear at whom the book was aimed. "An Introduction to Gunpowder" might give officials at the Department of Homeland Security the wrong idea. Therefore, I propose: "The History and Importance of Gunpowder." This title may not make the book a best-seller, but it does the job without a colon, in five authoritative words.
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Date: 2007-08-31 06:48 am (UTC)I don't think I've seen the word "catachresis" used in earnest in more than 20 years. I've sort of missed it.
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Date: 2007-08-31 06:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-01 05:57 am (UTC)