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Et Nunc... Per Hoc Signum: A Meditation on Genitives in Everyday Life Stories

Looking at texts in everyday life might seem an effort in both detachment and critical indifference. But, is it really? Texts deliver their visibility in the contrasts spelled out by a grammar in which qualities and functions depend on word orders and the intervention of prepositions. An inwardness documents their features, substantiates fragile items in comparison with a Greek or Latin declension and word-ending systems. It may detail signals, for example, the supernatural traits of an absent Momma, the virtues of a mythic figure, gendered labors, and only interpretive but systematic comparisons with different linguistic tables and memorial substantives. From the linguistic background—genetically identical with English and some twenty centuries distant—an old Greek or Latin framework transforms reading into a perpetual exercise in comparative interpretations. The main functions of the genitive might thus serve the task of a first vignette.

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