The Chapter: A Segmented History from Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century

by Nicholas Dames

Overview

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism

A history of the chapter from its origins in antiquity to today

Why do books have chapters? With this seemingly simple question, Nicholas Dames embarks on a literary journey spanning two millennia, revealing how an ancient editorial technique became a universally recognized component of narrative art and a means to register the sensation of time.

Dames begins with the textual compilations of the Roman world, where chapters evolved as a tool to organize information. He goes on to discuss the earliest divisional systems of the Gospels and the segmentation of medieval romances, describing how the chapter took on new purpose when applied to narrative texts and how narrative segmentation gave rise to a host of aesthetic techniques. Dames shares engaging and in-depth readings of influential figures, from Sterne, Goethe, Tolstoy, and Dickens to George Eliot, Machado de Assis, B. S. Johnson, Agnès Varda, Uwe Johnson, Jennifer Egan, and László Krasznahorkai. He illuminates the sometimes tacit, sometimes dramatic ways in which the chapter became a kind of reckoning with time and a quiet but persistent feature of modernity.

Ranging from ancient tablets and scrolls to contemporary fiction and film, The Chapter provides a compelling, elegantly written history of a familiar compositional mode that readers often take for granted and offers a new theory of how this versatile means of dividing narrative sculpts our experience of time.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691135199
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	11/07/2023
Pages:	384
Sales rank:	127,058
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Nicholas Dames is the Theodore Kahan Professor of Humanities at Columbia University and an editor in chief of Public Books. He is the author of The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction and Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting, and British Fiction, 1810–1870.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“The Chapter is that rare thing: a scholar’s book that is at once learned and delightful. Nicholas Dames has written a supple, elegant, unfussy, and wide-ranging history of how the curious practice of dividing prose into its component parts has taught readers to experience the flow of time. From The Chapter and its many masterful theories of narrative measurement, we learn what it is to wait, to hope, to search, to find; to pause, to rest, to breathe.”—Merve Emre, Wesleyan University, contributing writer at The New Yorker

“The Chapter is one of those books whose confidence and sweep—from classical and scholastic literature through to the modern avant-garde—is thrilling. Dames’s elegant close readings are a continual delight, showing how our sense of suspense, or transition, or the containment of time, or of the Jamesian scene, may derive not from the text itself but from its scrupulous segmentation. Under Dames’s careful eye, the chapter is revealed to be a venerable and singularly adaptable literary device, the Swiss Army knife of Western narrative.”—Dennis Duncan, author of Index, A History of the: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age

“This is the masterwork we did not know we needed, on a topic easy to overlook. What Scott McCloud did for the gutter in comics, Nicholas Dames has done for an equally vital, equally unobtrusive sort of textual pause. Dames’s prose is lucid and elegant while his brilliantly chosen examples are legion without being overwhelming. I will never turn from one chapter to the next in the same way again.”—John Plotz, author of Semi-Detached

“The chapter is one of those topics that remain invisible precisely because they lie in plain sight. Tracing the evolution of a citational device for scholars and an editorial device for sacred texts into a compositional unit for novelists, Dames raises questions so fundamental that they have either flown under the radar or, in their vastness and ubiquity, scared other scholars away. The Chapter dares a chronological and generic sweep more reminiscent of an Auerbach than of any recent critic or theorist, but never at the expense of granularity.”—Leah Price, author of What We Talk about When We Talk about Books

Editorial Reviews

"Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Awards, Criticism Category"

A New Yorker Best Book We've Read This Year

A Seminary Co-Op Notable Book of the Year

"Winner of the PROSE Award in Literature, Association of American Publishers"

From the Publisher

"One of the most thrilling things a book of criticism can do is answer a question that you didn't know you had. . . . After reading The Chapter, you will never quite read anything else the same way."

Members Of The National Book Critics Circle Board

"Dames considers the nature of the chapter, a subjective division that nonetheless organizes our understanding of life and literature. . . . For Dames, form begets function—and neither is above scrutiny."

New Yorker

"This fascinating study causes the reader to reflect on narrative sequences in time, and on the flow of time in reading and life."

Paradigm Explorer

2023-08-09
The origins of the modern book chapter.

Dames, a professor of humanities at Columbia and author of The Physiology of the Novel, acknowledges that “the chapter” might strike some as a boring topic. Writing about something so “embarrassingly common, the musty old furniture of the book,” runs the risk of sounding pedantic. However, Dames shows exactly why chapters are worth our attention. Though they often sit below the threshold of our notice, they shape our thinking about time and transition. The author offers a pleasing investigation of why they exist and “what…they [do] to our sense of time. He analyzes segmentation decisions made over the course of history by the various agents—authors, scribes, printers, editors—involved in making books. He finds that the function of the chapter has shifted over the millennia, from antiquity to the present. What began as a tool for facilitating discontinuous access to information became, by the early modern period, a tool for experimenting with temporal matters. “The art of the chapter” becomes “necessarily an art of poignancy,” as the modern narrative chapter represents, in a variety of ways, the passage of time. The author’s case studies are diverse, and his analyses are rich. He shows how 15th-century editors used chapter breaks to “insert a feeling of presentness” and linger on “swiftly passing gestures.” He describes the case of an 18th-century abolitionist, formerly enslaved, who wrote an autobiography in which each chapter “speaks of a time structure that is not one’s own”—“an inhabited or endured…time.” In the 19th century, novelists often blended their chapter breaks into the diurnal rhythms of the day. Bringing us up to the present, Dames explores how the old convention of the chapter looks “too rote…to pulse with reality” and yet still endures, continuing to organize our books and our understanding of our lives.

A comprehensive history of an understudied element of literature.

Kirkus Reviews