prolepsis
/prəʊˈlɛpsɪs
/ /prəʊˈliːpsɪs/noun (plural prolepses /prəʊˈlɛpsiːz/) [mass noun]
1 Rhetoric The anticipation and answering of possible objections in rhetorical speech.Drexler's book Engines of Creation is an extraordinary exercise in prolepsis: he meticulously refutes every technical objection he can anticipate....
- For Gilio, prolepsis was a ‘figure,’ a rhetorical device employed to augment the beauty of the work.
2The representation of a thing as existing before it actually does or did so, as in he was a dead man when he entered.
2.1 literary A figurative device in narrative, in which a future event is prefigured: the destruction of the Vendôme Column and his part in it are foreshadowed in moments of haunting prolepsis...
- He falls back first on a venerable narrative device: prolepsis or foreshadowing.
Derivatives
proleptic
- The anti-Arcadian proleptic elegies of the late 1930s, in other words, and the critique of consolatory language they offer, can be said to have opened up a path toward the welfare state.
- Anticipation is intuitively, ironically proleptic in that it both foresees things in their absence and, in the very act of apprehension, presents them unwittingly into being.
- In formulation, the utterance is predictive or proleptic (he will imminently pour himself a drink, check the contents of the bottle).
Origin
Late Middle English (as a term in rhetoric): via late Latin from Greek prolēpsis, from prolambanein 'anticipate', from pro 'before' + lambanein 'take'.