anacrisis

English

Noun

anacrisis (plural anacrises)

1. (historical) A stage of the Ancient Greek judicial process in which all of the evidence is produced prior to the trial.
   • 1853, William Smith, A Smaller Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, page 132:

     If the plaintiff failed to appear at the anacrisis, the suit, of course, fell to the 'ground; if the defendant made default, judgment passed against him.

   • 1881, Frederic Charles Cook, The Holy Bible, According to the Authorized Version:

     It is not in the court of an unaccusing conscience that I am declared righteous, but in the wider sphere of Christ's anacrisis or preliminary scrutiny, for He now takes note of my work, that He may judge a righteous judgment in the great Day.'

   • 1895, James Hastings, Ann Wilson Hastings, Edward Hastings, The Expository Times - Volume 6, page 524:

     At this anacrisis witnesses were interrogated, slaves examined under torture, documents produced, oaths administered, and all those tedious routine processes gone through, which now take place in open court.

   • 1895, Percy Gardner, Frank Byron Jevons, A Manual of Greek Antiquities - Volume 1, page 527:

     The litigant then, in making his speech, when he wished to cite the law in support of his argument, could call on the clerk of the court to read the extracts which he had put in at the anacrisis.

   • 1900, Guy Carleton Lee, Historical Jurisprudence, page 179:

     The whole course of the ordinary suit at law, as carried on at Athens after the Solonian reforms, may be divided into five stages : the summons, the appearance before the magistrate, the preliminary hearing or anacrisis, the trial before the dicastery, and the judgment.

2. An interrogation that provokes its subject to make explicit his or her underlying assumptions and deeply held values.
   • 1985, Aaron Fogel, Coercion to Speak: Conrad's Poetics of Dialogue, →ISBN, page 29:

     Socrates is the archetypal high master of subtle, ironic anacrisis.

   • 2005 Spring, Michael Svoboda, “The Rebirth of Dialogue: Bakhtin, Socrates, and the Rhetorical Tradition by James P. Zappen”, in Rhetoric Society Quarterly, volume 35, number 2:

     In explicating this work, Zappen points to the work of engaged listening, which can manifest itself in anacrisis, the critical testing of one's views, and/or syncrisis, the critical comparison of opposing views.

   • 2009 March, Nicholas Dorn, Tom Vander Beken, “Saidabad, Pretoria, Sarajevo, The Hague, Brussels: conflicts and cooperation in security and policing”, in Crime, Law and Social Change, volume 51, number 2:

     Another of Socrates' techniques was anacrisis, meaning luring one's interlocutors (or maybe oneself) into making explicit one's otherwise hidden and taken-for-granted assumptions—in other words, surfacing deep assumptions as explicit propositions.

3. (literary criticism) A dialog or plot event that causes a character to reveal his or her beliefs and motivations.
   • 1998, Terence J. Martin, Living Words: Studies in Dialogues Over Religion, →ISBN, page 228:

     As Bakhtin points out, the "classical Christian dialogic syncrises" (dyads) of the tempted and the tempter, the believer and the nonbeliever, the righteous and the sinner, the beggar and the rich man, etc., as well as the "corresponding anacrises" ("provocations through discourse or plot situation") are familiar to literature developed "within the orbit of menippea."

   • 2010, P Fambrough, “Ionesco's Rhinocéros and the Menippean Tradition”, in Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, volume 34, number 1:

     A genre of “ultimate questions of worldview,” it features internal and external dialogue, including the anacrisis or provocation of a word by others' words, and a utopian vision.

   • 2013, Ulf Olsson, Silence and Subject in Modern Literature:

     In identifying the weak spot in Fanny – her longing for Mother and home – Edmund entices her to speak: he is practising anacrisis.

   • 2009, Harold Bloom, Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky, →ISBN, page 46:

     The corresponding anacrises are also developed (that is, provocation through discourse or plot situation).