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Inceptions Literary Beginnings and Contingencies of Form

The beginning is both internal and external to the text it initiates, and that noncoincidence points to the text's vexed relation with its outside. Hence the nontrivial self-reflexivity of any textual beginning, which must bear witness to the self-grounding quality of the literary work— its inability either to comprise its inception or to externalize it in an authorizing exteriority. In a different but related way, the fact that they must begin renders our lives and our desires opaque to us; what Freud called "latency" marks not only sexuality but human thought with a self-division shaped by asynchronicity.From Henry James's New York Edition prefaces to George Eliot's epigraphs, from Ovid's play with meter to Charles Dickens's thematizing of the ex nihilo emergence of character, from Walla

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