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Why did books start being divided into chapters? A new history

sydneyreviewofbooks.com

41–50 of 68 posts

Re: Why did books start being divided into chapters? A new history

#41
post #39
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read Isaac Asimov’s foundation series a few years ago (side note for anyone who hasn’t read it: it still holds up incredibly well with a small suspension of disbelief and some grace for when it was written). In the preface to the 4th or 5th book (which were written 30+ years after the “original” trilogy) he discussed how the originals parts of the trilogy were published as a set of short stories in a SciFi publicat…

"it still holds up incredibly well" Can't confirm. I couldn't get through the first 100 pages.

The ideas in it are fascinating (if also dated). The characters, though, are insanely 1 dimensional. It's very obviously a 1 micron thin story layered over the scaffold of ideas. After looking at it that way, I could get through the series without groaning or laughing a lot.

Re: Why did books start being divided into chapters? A new history

#42
post #2

> It was the Victorian novel that made the chapter seem natural. Key to the reality effects of nineteenth-century British fiction is its synchronisation of novel time with the natural rhythms of life. As a result, novelistic chapters lose their theatrics, their posturing and posing, even those unstable amalgamations surveyed in Equiano and Goethe, and instead become regular and ‘tacit’, receding into the background.…

I did not learn writing formally, and I do not publish what I write. But I do write a lot, mostly fiction to express the things that happen to myself in a controlled environment. I tried not writing in chapters, but I find that the chapters helped me compartmentalize different times and places and specific subjects. It may be that I'm simply used to chapters from reading other books, but no matter what the book I fin…

Most writers kinda skip chapters. Instead, on early drafts, they focus on scenes, which might be 1:1 with a chapter, but are often 2:1 or even 3:1 with a chapter. The relationship between paragraphs, scenes, and chapters, is one way of thinking about and manipulating pace in a story.

Re: Why did books start being divided into chapters? A new history

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> some grace for when it was written I reread it last year and I needed to give it a lot of grace, mostly from it's treatment of women. To Asimov's credit, there's no overt sexism - he manages to bypass that by having almost no female characters at all. There's a single female character who has no agency, every other character is white and male. I understand it's a product of it's time, and avoid judgment. However, t…

> there's no overt sexism - he manages to bypass that by having almost no female characters at all. That is true for much of classical literature, going all the way back to the Greeks.

> That is true for much of classical literature, going all the way back to the Greeks.

It is not, in fact.

Re: Why did books start being divided into chapters? A new history

#44
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the verses. How else could I deep-link to a total banger line like Matthew 25:40?

By using the web? https://bible.conman.org/kj/Matthew.25:40

How about from the years 200ad to 1900ad?

What would you use as the indexing system to refer to specific elements in the whole work across various languages?

Re: Why did books start being divided into chapters? A new history

#45

The Latin quoted is wrong ("de nomine deferundo iduibusque legundeis" should be "de nomine deferundo iudicibusque legundeis") and the Greek "kephalaia" is plural while the Latin terms with it are singular. "Titlos" is the Greek way of writing the Latin "titulus," which is a weird thing to have in a list like that; the only place I can remember seeing it is the Bible. This comes across as sloppy work from someone in a…

titlos/τίτλος: Its singular Biblical use in John 19:19-20 (prb. "inscription") is separate from its later use in (heavily Latin-influenced) Byzantine jurisprudence documents, where it frequently gets used to label section numbers: ΤΙΤΛΟΣ Α´.

Re: Why did books start being divided into chapters? A new history

#46

The Latin quoted is wrong ("de nomine deferundo iduibusque legundeis" should be "de nomine deferundo iudicibusque legundeis") and the Greek "kephalaia" is plural while the Latin terms with it are singular. "Titlos" is the Greek way of writing the Latin "titulus," which is a weird thing to have in a list like that; the only place I can remember seeing it is the Bible. This comes across as sloppy work from someone in a…

Can you point to something with the text of the tablet? I was curious, but all I could find were references to an 1863 attempt at reconstructing it by Theodor Mommsen. I'm not sure why "language skills" are necessary for this piece - these questions are fundamentally about what the words inscribed on a document are, not what those words mean. It could easily be true that Latin scrolls started labeling something "capi…

It's the Lex Acilia Repetundarum from the second century BC; the standard reference would be CIL i.198. While parts of have been restored, there's no way that "iduibusque" could have been part of the heading, as "iduibus" simply isn't a word in Latin of any era. Nobody from Mommsen onward prints anything but "iudicibusque," because that is a word, and "iudices (d)eligere" is the usual legal phrase for picking jurymen, just like "nomen deferre" is a standard phrase for indicting someone. The author of the article did not have privileged access to some special truth about this: whatever he copied from said "iudicibusque," and he miscopied it. If you're looking for a text with notes and standardized orthography, Lindsay (1897) _Handbook of Latin Inscriptions_ 84-88.

Again, later Christian Greek texts (probably codices rather than scrolls) could have called "kephalaion" the thing Latin marked as "caput" (not in the article, but very common in Latin; Cicero uses it in _De Inventione_) or "capitulum," and in fact Greek texts did so in imitation of the Latin, but "kephalaia" is plural, and the author, despite writing about the history of terms, doesn't seem to know that.

It's also odd that he discusses Aulus Gellius' _Attic Nights_ without talking about Pliny the Elder's _Natural History,_ on which Gellius likely based his concept of an index and chapter headings. In Pliny, the chapter headings proceed logically through thematically related groups in a taxonomy, so you can drill down through the index to the chapter you want by looking for the larger genus to which it might be a species. If you're looking for a particular rock, for example, you start in the index under rocks and then look for a more specific type of rock, rather than looking under plants or geography. Gellius turns this on its head, quite possibly intentionally: none of his chapters fall into any sort of order that anyone has ever been able to discern, so you have to read the entire index of chapter headings (itself a book in length) in order to locate one you might be seeking. Besides being the first, to my knowledge, openly user-hostile interface, I think that makes it harder to believe what the author says about the Attic Nights being "only something to be consulted partially, and on occasion, rather than read and absorbed line-by-line." It's actually really hard to use the Attic Nights as a reference book in that way, not only because of how Gellius set up the index and disordered the chapters but also because it was originally published in linear-access scrolls rather than a random-access codex, making quick reference even more difficult. So, it's odd that the author skips from headings that organize a legal treatise straight to Gellius' chapter headings summarizing, but not organizing, his random miscellany without some mention in between of someone like Pliny, who organizes chapters into a taxonomy.

There's already a lot of scholarship about chapter markings and other paratextual devices in ancient literature: Butler (2009) "Cicero's Capita" in _The Roman Paratext_ shows that Cicero's speeches were capitulated in antiquity without written rubrics or headings, marking new units of text on the same argument instead by extending the first line into the left margin; surely this is a step that should have been considered on the road from legal text rubrics to chapters without headings as a temporal organizational device in novels.

Maybe the book did the topic more justice than the review.

Re: Why did books start being divided into chapters? A new history

#47
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont buy it. You have to cherry pick among classics hard to come with the "much of it does not have female characters" conclusion. Much of it do have women in it. As I go through them in my head, almost everything has some women in it, at least existing in larger world. Except "Old Man and the Sea" one character against the world kind of things. Hemingway has women in other books tho.

You invented a quote that does not quote anything I said, so I won't defend it. I suggest that you notice the word "almost" in the text I quoted in my original comment.

Frankly, you are just wrong about content of classical literature.

Re: Why did books start being divided into chapters? A new history

#48

If you've ever waded hip deep into publication technology, you can see how the 2nd CE heading has moved down, down, down, down all the way to the individual word level, in something like a DITA `conref` where the individual word is a reference. Even though DITA pays my checks, I've always been apprehensive about functionality like `conref`[1] in a general-purpose document. You can only fuss with natural language for…

> he system of chapter-and-verse left scripture ‘so chop’d and minc’d […] so broken and divided’

I don't get the problem. You never hear them, and when you read them yourself, you also just ignore them. When your starting at a chapter, just read the last few verses of the previous to get the context.

Re: Why did books start being divided into chapters? A new history

#49
There is a great book from brazilian writer Guimaraes Rosa which explores both "unusual" way of speaking portuguese and the role of chapters (by not having them over its >500 pages!).

The book is "Grande Sertão Veredas" (it has an ongoing translation to english which is going on for over 10+ years). Rosa is an educated diplomat, and he choose to explore the culture, language, landscapes and subjectivness of the place he grew, in some rural area of a small city in Minas Gerais.

At the beginning both "features" usually cause some frustration. It is really hard to understand some expressions or know who is speaking, or if its just a thought, or even when or where something is happening. And that goes on in an never ending continuum.

Nevertheless, if you keep going, you're rewarded with a incredible immersive experience. The unusual and becomes playful, the continum becomes the flown of a river (the Sao Francisco river!). And on top of all that, an epic sertanejo's Fausto slowly unfolds towards one of the best endings of brazilian literature.

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