Unbeginnings: the Fragment as a Round Space

Abstract

Modernist and postmodernist writing has always been preoccupied with points of beginning in narrative and poetry. When narratives never seem to take off they articulate the impossibility of beginning as a desire to elude linearity. My essay argues that by bending linearity through inflection and hence through fragmentation a round space is created. I suggest that the round space of the fragment constitutes a moment of what can be termed the unbeginning.