Expand Your Jargon I: Analeptic Prolepsis

As I've been getting ready for going on the job market in the fall, I have realized that my snootiness has something to be desired. Back in college, I had a pretty firm grip on impressive vocabulary words. "Axiology presupposes metaphysics" was a mantra with me. But in grad school, there's more competition over who has mastery of the trendiest words. Even when I learn a word, I discover a month or so later that I've completely forgotten it. So, I've decided every so often in my blog to feature a literary or technical term for emulation. Disclaimer: I am an amateur when it comes to snooty literary terms, so I will try to explain the term's usage as I best understand it, and am most amused by it.

Out term for today is "analeptic prolepsis." What is especially cool about this term, besides being long, is it seems like it should be a contradiction. According to Gerard Genette's Narrative Discourse, prolepsis is "any narrative maneuver that consists of narrating or evoking in advance an event that will take place later," and analepsis is "any evocation after the fact of an event that took place earlier than the point in the story where we are at any given moment." To simplify, analepsis is a flashback (going back to an earlier event), and prolepsis is like foreshadowing--it anticipates or gives advance notice of an event (e.g. Terminator's "I'll be back," Jesus's "I'll rebuild the temple in three days," etc.).

So what is an analeptic prolepsis? You could see it as "the future within the past." Another way to understand it as a flashback to an earliermoment of foreshadowing. For instance, at the end of Sixth Sense, when Bruce Willis is first realizing he's a ghost, he has a flashback in which he remembers the kid telling him, "sometimes ghosts don't even know they're dead ..." only we now see that it was proleptic, because it foreshadowed that Willis was the ghost who was dead. Think how much fun it would be to prognosticate early on in the movie, "I bet this is going to turn into an analeptic prolepsis later": in fact, such a prognostication would almost be a "proleptic analeptic prolepsis" (foreshadowing a flashback about foreshadowing), and just how cool is that? (Answer: very cool.) It's probably also a fun term to bring to a Bible study, where New Testament authors are constantly flashing back to Old Testament passages: "This passage really touched me--I was moved by the epistle's use of the analeptic prolepsis with the book of Psalms." Sure, other snooty Bible people can throw around terms like "JEDP" and "hermeneutics," but I prognosticate that analeptic prolepsis will blow them all out of the water. Upon that, you have my proleptic analeptic prolepsis.