I had written a sentence from W.G. Sebald on the blackboard, and a student in the front row said that she had begun trying to figure out how the parts of her life fit together. ”Oh,“ I said, ”then you have to read Proust.“ I held up my hands to show the approximate length (width?) of all seven volumes of In Search of Lost Time. ”Three thousand pages!“ I said. Was that accurate? And then I saw that I had misspelled Sebald as Siebold.
This is the twenty-ninth teaching dream I’ve had since retiring in 2015. In all but one, something has gone wrong.
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Tuesday, June 4, 2024
Siebold
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comments: 7
“[H]as goes wrong.” Can’t snooker me. I see what you did there.
Yikes! wish that I could take credit, but it was nothing more than an oversight. Maybe my Mac was “correcting” my spelling more quickly than I could catch. Now corrected, so thanks.
Let’s say you had purposely typed “has goes wrong,” so that the sentence both describes and itself illustrates something gone wrong. Is there a (fancy Greek) name for this for rhetorical device? I couldn’t find one.
I don’t know of one. But I'm reminded of the sentence that goes something like this:
There are threee erors in this sentence.
Perfect example! Thanks.
I think I found it in Gödel, Escher, Bach. Always a nice diversion when teaching.
Aha — I think the idea you’re after is self-reference.
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