palimpsestuous

English

Alternative forms

• palimpcestuous
• (rare) palincestuous

Etymology

From palimpsest +‎ -ous by surface analysis, but also a humorous blend of palimpsest (“a text with several layers”) +‎ incestuous (“involving relationships between related things”). Coined by Anthony Burgess (as palimpcestuous, with a suggested alternative form palincestuous to make the connection with incestuous clearer) to describe self-reference and the use of wordplay in the works of James Joyce.

Adjective

palimpsestuous (comparative more palimpsestuous, superlative most palimpsestuous)

1. Pertaining to the textual relationality of a palimpsest; referential to earlier works or self-referential between several meanings of a single text.
   • 1965, Anthony Burgess, “ALP and her Letter”, in Re Joyce, page 210:

     But this missive from Boston may be taken as a palimpcestuous précis of Finnegans Wake itself

   • 2001, Christine Olga Kiebuzinska, Intertextual Loops in Modern Drama, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, →ISBN, page 31:

     In a palimpsestuous reading, the hypertext, or the original, always stands to gain by having its hypertextual status perceived.

   • 2013, Lucyna Krawczyk-Żywko, quoting McCaw, Holmes and the Ripper: Versus Narratives, Springer Nature, →ISBN, page 97:

     All adaptations are palimpsestuous (Hutcheon 2006), and Holmes's “are perhaps the most palimpsestuous of all popular-cultural reworkings" (McCaw 2013:36)

   • 2021 April 20, Lena Mattheis, Translocality in Contemporary City Novels, Springer Nature, →ISBN, page 68:

     Nonetheless, Tuyen combines the planned part of her artwork, the book of longings, with found objects and parts of previous projects, which again makes the artwork resemble a more palimpsestuous structure.

   • 2021, A. Elisabeth Reichel, Writing Anthropologists, Sounding Primitives, →ISBN, page 207:

     What renders these poems valuable in a post-Writing Culture context of contested cultural representation is a peculiar, palimpsestuous quality.

Related terms

• palimpsestic