[lit-ideas] META META ...

In a message dated 5/23/2009 11:04:41 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
_jwager@xxxxxxxxxxx (mailto:jwager@xxxxxxxxxx)
> The poster of today claims:
>>...no one but the subject has  participated in
>>the thread "Re:   META".
Since we're discussing the nature and role of a possible META  LIT-IDEAS
list, wouldn't this be most appropriately moved to the
META  META LIT-IDEAS list list?

Excellent point.

One would think that the use of 'meta-' is academic jargon. And it  is!

--- if one defines 'meta-', as per the OED, but tweaking the definition to
read, "second or higher order", then there's no real need to coin 'meta 
meta':

"These formations became common for scientific terms from the 19th cent.
onwards (the earliest example appears to be METAMATHEMATICAL adj.), and have
become more widespread with the development of new academic disciplines,
especially the social sciences, predominantly with the sense ‘dealing with
second-order questions’."

For the use of 'meta-literary':

1965 Man 65 29

The reappearance in the myth of Lake Munkamba of the Welsh, Pyrenean, and
Cameroonian theme of the drowned city, reminds us..that the universalities
of  content in stories of this kind will always raise them to a level better
called  meta-literary than literary.

1976 T. EAGLETON Crit. & Ideol. i. 18

As a meta-literary practice, a metaphor of the text, criticism writes large
 the text's inability to think the conditions of its own possibility.

1991 E. J. SMYTH Postmodernism & Contemp. Fiction iv. 77

Two very intelligent novels..both of which have a metaliterary dimension
which links them to Calvino's other influential late novel.

For the use of 'meta-literature'

[< META- prefix + LITERATURE n., perhaps after French métalittérature
(1925).

1966 Jrnl. Politics 28 482

The conventional concerns of political philosophy receive a delightful
treatment free of the murky meta-literature often found in such texts.

1972 P. HODGSON in Pacific Coast Philol. 7 36 (title)

Metaliterature: an excerpt from the anatomy of a Chekhovian narrator.

1988 MLN 103 449 Doña Berta exists simultaneously as literary object and as
 metaliterature.

1995 Symposium (Electronic ed.) 1 Mar., Cargiale's writings often
accentuate..direct address and metaliterature, linguistic play and postmodern
discursive amalgamation.

And finally,
[< META- prefix + LANGUAGE n., after German Metasprache (A. Tarski 1935,
in Studia Philosophica 1 282), itself after Tarski's Polish coinage metajzyk
(1931).

In Aristotle, 'meta-' just means 'next to'. The books next to the ones in
physics. In Greek, it could also mean 'behind', as in "METAPHRENUM", and
must say I prefer the idea of metaphysics as being behind physics than beyond
it.

For: what _is_ the beyond? Cfr. Brooke Shields:

"Smoking kills. If you're killed, you've lost a very important part   If
you're killed, you've lost a very important part of your life,"

during an interview to become Spokesperson for federal anti-smoking
_www.rateitall.com/i-843843-smoking-kills-if-youre-killed-youve-lost-a-very-
important-part-of-your-life-brooke-shields-durin_
(http://www.rateitall.com/i-843843-smoking-kills-if-youre-killed-youve-lost-a-very-important-part-of-y
our-life-brooke-shields-durin) ...

On the other hand, 'meta-language', overused, has nothing to do with it. My
 favourite has to be 'meta-ethics': which I do all the time when I speak
with  abortionists.

J. L. Speranza
    Buenos Aires, Argentina
**************Recession-proof vacation ideas.  Find free things to do in
the U.S.
(http://travel.aol.com/travel-ideas/domestic/national-tourism-week?ncid=emlcntustrav00000002)
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