UNTWISTING THE SHANDEAN YARN OF DIGRESSION, „CAMP” AND PARADOX
UNTWISTING THE SHANDEAN YARN OF DIGRESSION, „CAMP” AND PARADOX

Summary/Abstract: From the premise that Reverend Laurence Sterne’s Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent. is an extremely twisted yarn that has challenged literary critics, philosophers and mathematicians for nearly three hundred years, the paper moves on to the middle of this writerly novel to also discuss its beginning and “ending” (sic!) as important segments of the narrative. This middle (Volume IV of nine) does not only provide certain (minimal clues to how digression, allusion, “quotation,” plagiarism even and camp (a type of attitude defined much later in the history of English) function in turning this metanarrative into an unexpected--and unsuspected—forerunner of many postmodernist methods, but it also contains the formidable “Tristram Shandy Paradox” on the relationships between lived life, written life, unwritten life, and possibly unwritten life, a paradox by which Bertrand Russell initiated a highly passionate intellectual debate.

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