Chapter Sub-titles
The original French version of the text has an extended table of contents at the back of the book that includes what look to be sub-titles for each of the chapters. For instance, the chapter entitled La ‘Sensation’ has the following sub-titles: Comme impression. Comme qualité. Comme la conséquence immédiate d’une excitation. Qu’est-ce que le sentir? Unfortunately, these have been left out of the Smith translation. Even in the original French version, however, there is no indication as to which parts of the text these sub-titles cover. It sure would be nice to have the sub-titles in the body of the translation. One of the issues, then, will be where to put them. I understand from Bert Dreyfus that one of the translations (was it the translation into Swiss German?) has attempted this. Has anyone seen this translation? Any sense for how successful their choices were? A further note on the jump…
I used to think it was a peculiar and unique feature of French books to have an extended table of contents - just the way they tend to put the table of contents at the back of the book instead of the front. But - and probably most people have noticed this already - lots of American books used to have extended tables of contents too. I was reading James’s Varieties of Religious Experience the other day, for example, and he’s done just exactly the same thing. And just as with PP, there is no indication in the body of the text about which parts are covered by which sub-title. It leads me to believe that perhaps these were not so much sub-titles or sub-headings, therefore, as short synopses of the chapter. A sort of Cliff Notes published along with the book. If that’s right, then there’s no guarantee that the sub-titles actually correspond - and in order - to parts of the text. Any thoughts?
Comments
One option, then, is to put the subheadings in the table of contents at the beginning, but without specific page references. That could avoid possibly undecidable dilemmas about where exactly to insert them.
Posted by: Taylor Carman | February 1, 2006 7:01 PM
Yes, that’s essentially what MP does. I think it might be useful for the reader if we can put the headings into the text. But I agree that it’s only worth doing so if there is no particularly difficult question about where they go.
In general, I’m thinking that one of the principles of the translation will be to make it easier to follow what MP is saying. It is often very hard to read PP, and my general sense is that it shouldn’t be. But one runs the risk of being too interventionist here, and there’s no doubt that too much intervention is … well … uh … too much.
Posted by: Sean Kelly | February 1, 2006 8:55 PM
It certainly would have helped me during my first reading of PoP! I wonder if MP meant them to be a list of the contents of the chapter, but didn’t think that the actual text followed the contents in a neat serial order.
Posted by: Eric | March 12, 2006 1:24 PM
I think this would be very helpful. Sam Mallin (1979. Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy. New Haven: Yale University Press.) has an appendix that proposes insertion points for the subtitles, which have always seemed pretty plausible to me. I am now teaching PP for about the sixth time and each time I have distributed Mallin’s list to students and used it as a pedagogical device, which students have found helpful.
Posted by: David Morris | March 19, 2006 1:01 PM
I still don’t understand what is the subtitle of a book, because would you give me more of example,
Posted by: wes | September 12, 2007 8:42 PM