metaleptic
- adjective
- /ˌmɛtəˈlɛptɪk/
- Literature
- In literature, a metaleptic style involves referring to actions or concepts through complex layers of meaning.
- a metaleptic gesture
- a metaleptic transgression
- a metaleptic trope
Examples
-
I will from now on eliminate type 5 from discussion because I do not consider it to be properly metaleptic.
Academic text (2003) -
"Head" is a metaleptic site, compressing metonymy, synecdoche, and metaphor.
Academic text (1997) -
The metaleptic gesture staged here marks a departure from the previous examples in terms of agency.
Academic text (2016) -
The metaleptic interruptions in Broken figure the precariousness of the author figure's creative agency.
Academic text (2016) -
Fittingly, perhaps, this metaleptic break does not serve to underline the author's power over her creations but rather marks the beginning.
Academic text (2016) -
The metaleptic transgressions implied here operate between the real author or real reader and the text, jumping the extradiegetic textual level.
Academic text (2003) -
The metaleptic relationship is elliptical, covertly echoing the past, "elusive and allusive" at once.
Academic text (1997) -
Indeed, Emerson's metaleptic passage overwhelms readers like a force of nature, one that Longinus likens to the rhetoric of the sublime.
Academic text (1997) -
My focus here is on the first, as my interest lies in fictionalized author figures and their methods of asserting their creative agency, metaleptic gestures being key to these stylistic machinations.
Academic text (2016) -
Emerson suggests these complex relationships through his arabesque imagery, a pattern woven with the many-textured threads of metaleptic troping.
Academic text (1997)
How Indirect
Surface Forms
Morphology
metaleptic = metalepsis (opaque) = metalepsis + ic
The adjective is a learned formation from the rare noun 'metalepsis', so knowing the suffix '-ic' does not make the meaning easy to infer for most learners.
Etymology
Metaleptic starts with meta- ('beyond'), the same 'meta' you see in metaphor and metadata, and ends with -leptic, from a part meaning 'to take', so it suggests 'taking beyond'. That's a helpful memory: a metaleptic moment in a story moves you beyond the normal meaning by jumping through a chain of links, so the word describes a way of referring to one thing by another through those links.