This Is the Title of This Story
This Is the Title of This Story, Which Is Also Found Several Times in the Story Itself is a 1982 story by David Moser composed of self-referential sentences. It appeared in Douglas Hofstadter's Scientific American column "Metamagical Themas," and was later reprinted in the book collecting his columns. It can also be found elsewhere online.
It begins:
"The purpose. Of this paragraph. Is to apologize. For its gratuitous use. Of. Sentence fragments. Sorry." |
"This sentence is telling you that Billy is blond and blue-eyed and American and twelve years old and strangling his mother." |
"This sentence can either serve as the beginning of the paragraph or the end, depending on its placement" |
"...other signs of inexcusably sloppy grammar like unneeded superfluous redundancies..." |
- Self-Deprecation: As well as several sentences that exist purely to apologise for the condition of the story, there's also one that refers to Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis as a much better story, and one that refers to the author as an "indolent goof-off" for not buckling down and actually telling the story of Billy and his mother.
- Shaped Like Itself
- Terse Talker
" A sentence fragment. Another. Good device. Will be used more later." |