Cento / 4th Century Montage
Please allow 10 working days to process before shipping
10oz Black Hoodie
Made in USA - 50% Cotton 50% Polyester
Corresponding Klew: K-14 "Techno and the Cut-up"
A cento is a literary or musical work, consisting of elements taken from one or more other works and rearranged to form a different text. In music, these are originally characteristic modal formulas that can be reused in other pieces. The term is of Latin origin ( cento ) and originally designated a cloth cloak made of several pieces.
Faltonia Betizia Proba (310 – 360) depicted in the De mulieribus claris (1362) by Giovanni Boccaccio
In late antiquity it was widely cultivated in both Latin and Greek (reworking the verses of Homer) with the intention of giving a classical form to the Christian message.
According to the prescriptions of ancient poetics, the following may serve as "building material" for a centon: a) a hemistich, b) a verse, c) a sesquistancia. Decimus Magnus Ausonius (4th century AD), who formulated this rule, believed that since the composition of a centon is a game ( Latin: ludus ), a competition ( aemulatio, contentio ), then the use of fragments exceeding the size of a sesquistancia makes the author's task too easy to complete, and the composition of a centon loses its meaning: "to take two verses in a row will be awkward, three - an unacceptable blunder ( merae nugae )".
The composition of centons is a form of literary play . Being a literary joke, a centon is all the more comical the better the reader's familiarity with the poems from which the lines are taken. The lines of a centon are supposed to be selected so that they are united by a common meaning and have the appearance of a finished work .
The artistic effect of a centon consists of the similarity or contrast between the new context and the recollection of the previous context of each fragment. Less strict centons transition into a poetry of reminiscences , sometimes overt, more often hidden.
Faltonia Betitia Proba wrote a Cento Vergilianus de laudibus Christi, in which she details the life of Jesus and deeds of the Old and New Testaments; it was written entirely in centos taken from Virgil.
During the Renaissance, Proba and her work were praised as examples of studiousness and scholarship. In a 1385 letter to Anna von Schweidnitz (the wife of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV), the Italian poet and scholar Petrarch referenced Proba and her work while discussing female geniuses, and in 1374 the humanist Giovanni Boccaccio included Proba in his biographical collection of historical and mythological women entitled De mulieribus claris.
In 1474, the poem was published by the Swiss printer Michael Wenssler, which likely made Proba the first female author to have had her work reproduced by a printing press. In 1518, Proba's work was once again being used in an educational setting, this time by John Colet of St Paul's School, who believed that Proba "wrote ... wysdom with clene and chast Latin".
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A6%D0%B5%D0%BD%D1%82%D0%BE%D0%BD
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cento_(poetry)
Melitzah is a medieval Hebrew literary device in which a mosaic of fragments and phrases from the Hebrew Bible as well as from rabbinic literature or the liturgy is fitted together to form a new statement of what the author intends to express at the moment. It is similar to cento.
In Hebrew the word melitzah means satire, mocking, taunting, enigma or witticism. In Freud's Moses (1991), Yosef Yerushalami wrote: "Melitzah, in effect, recalls Walter Benjamin's desire to someday write a work composed entirely of quotations. At any rate, it was a literary device employed widely in medieval Hebrew poetry and prose, then through the movement known as Haskalah, Hebrew for “enlightenment,” and even among nineteenth-century writers both modern and traditional".
Yerushalami argues: "In melitzah the sentences compounded out of quotations mean what they say; but below and beyond the surface they reverberate with associations to the original texts, and this is what makes them psychologically so interesting and valuable. In the transposition of a quotation from the original (in this case canonical) text to a new one, the meaning of the original context may be retained, altered, or subverted. In any case the original context trails along as an invisible interlinear presence, and the readers, like the writer, must be aware of these associations if they are to savor the new text to the full. A partial analogy may be found in T. S. Eliot's use of quotations in The Waste Land".
If he is successful in his use of melitzah, the author will arouse in the reader a particular set of images and associations which will add a certain texture and tone to what is being described—the chordal accompaniment, so to speak, to the melodic line.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melitzah
