THE CHAPTER

The origins of the modern book chapter.

Dames, a professor of humanities at Columbia and author of The Physiology of the Novel, acknowledges that “the chapter” might strike some as a boring topic. Writing about something so “embarrassingly common, the musty old furniture of the book,” runs the risk of sounding pedantic. However, Dames shows exactly why chapters are worth our attention. Though they often sit below the threshold of our notice, they shape our thinking about time and transition. The author offers a pleasing investigation of why they exist and “what…they [do] to our sense of time. He analyzes segmentation decisions made over the course of history by the various agents—authors, scribes, printers, editors—involved in making books. He finds that the function of the chapter has shifted over the millennia, from antiquity to the present. What began as a tool for facilitating discontinuous access to information became, by the early modern period, a tool for experimenting with temporal matters. “The art of the chapter” becomes “necessarily an art of poignancy,” as the modern narrative chapter represents, in a variety of ways, the passage of time. The author’s case studies are diverse, and his analyses are rich. He shows how 15th-century editors used chapter breaks to “insert a feeling of presentness” and linger on “swiftly passing gestures.” He describes the case of an 18th-century abolitionist, formerly enslaved, who wrote an autobiography in which each chapter “speaks of a time structure that is not one’s own”—“an inhabited or endured…time.” In the 19th century, novelists often blended their chapter breaks into the diurnal rhythms of the day. Bringing us up to the present, Dames explores how the old convention of the chapter looks “too rote…to pulse with reality” and yet still endures, continuing to organize our books and our understanding of our lives.

A comprehensive history of an understudied element of literature.