Self-fragmenting artefacts and comic pragmatics

ABSTRACT Our view of fragments as pieces on a page, torn from one or another whole, arises from the biological organicism of philosophers, especially Plato and Aristotle. This article turns instead to modern analogues (e.g. Marcel Duchamp's ‘readymades’) for new ways of conceptualizing the fragment. The investigation centres on a cognitive device that has not garnered sufficient attention: ‘pre-quotation’, a conscious shaping of their talk by the original authorizing speakers that aims from the start at being excerpted, repeated, and merged into a broader stream of discourse. The device relies in turn on the principle of ‘memorability’, which has been the subject of recent work in cognitive literary studies. A close reading of Menandrian ‘monostikhoi’ in combination with analysis of that comic poet's Aspis and of related dramas by Aristophanes and Euripides results in a proposed genealogy of ‘fragmentation’ and an evaluation of the habit within a variety of social contexts.