Skip to main content icon/video/no-internet
icon backReturn to Entries

Pointe

The term pointe, defined by the Oxford-Duden German Dictionary as a “punch line, conceit or [plot] twist,” refers in French and German to the witty effect of funny, surprising, and ingenious twists. Prototypically, pointes can be found at the end of short literary narrative texts, such as jokes, anecdotes, and epigrams.

For the sake of a terminological overview, it is useful to differentiate between (1) the use of pointe in normative treatises of the 17th and 18th centuries that give advice on how to write literary texts, and (2) its descriptive use in research (in particular in German), where the term has a meaning similar to that of “punch line.”

History

Etymologically, pointe is something acute or pointed, and during the Renaissance it appears as a literary term in French literature as a translation of the Latin acutus (acumen). However, the most pertinent treatises on the pointe, which were written at that time in Spain and Italy, used different words to refer to witty, surprising, so-called ingenious literary effects (Spanish agudezza, concepto; Italian acutezza, argutia, argutezza, concetto). These treatises were particularly interested in the means used to impress an audience with surprising stylistic artistry, so-called conceits (although concetti and conceptos were not confined to metaphors). In Spain, Baltasar Gracián (1648) presented the concepto as a way of producing new and surprising ideas. In Italy, Emanuele Tesauro (1654) praised the accutezze for the intellectual delight of combining “far-fetched” concepts. This poetic interest in the pointe coincided with a general fondness for antithetical style. For instance, John Donne contrasted burning fire with water in his epigram on “Hero and Leander,” two mythical lovers who drowned in the Hellespont: “Both rob’d of aire we both lye on the ground / Both whom one fire had burnt, one water drowned.”

The term pointe itself is connected to French classicists' criticism of the excessive use of rhetoric and ingenious style in literature in the 18th century. Charles Batteux (1754), for instance, stressed that the pointe should only be used in epigrams, if it is based on a similarity of ideas and not only of words. Samuel Johnson (1779) criticized the “metaphysical poets” for their “far-fetched” and “false conceits.” Nevertheless, the pointe continued to be a serious subject of inquiry in relation to epigrams throughout the 18th century. In Germany, the poet and philologist Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1777) adopted the word pointe into German, in order to describe the bipartite structure of epigrams consisting of an “expectation” (Erwartung) and a resolution (Aufschluβ) that triggers the pointe through a witty but not artificial ending.

The Pointe in Modern Research

Modern research on the pointe differs from poetical treatises in that it is less concerned with the issue of how and when poets should use this literary device. Rather, toward the end of the 19th century, it starts to systematically explore the aesthetic effect of the pointe and to analyze the objects that trigger such an effect. Emil Kraepelin, one of the founding fathers of empirical psychology, understood the pointe as an effect created by an “intellectual contrast.” Theodor Lipps, on the other hand, understood pointes in terms of overcoming a psychological inhibition, which influenced Freud’s book on Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905/1960).

...

  • Loading...
locked icon

Sign in to access this content

Get a 30 day FREE TRIAL

  • Watch videos from a variety of sources bringing classroom topics to life
  • Read modern, diverse business cases
  • Explore hundreds of books and reference titles

Read next

More like this

Sage Recommends

We found other relevant content for you on other Sage platforms.

close

Have you created a personal profile? Login or create a profile so that you can save clips, playlists and searches

close
close
close Signed In to profile You are signed in as:
close
Logged in Institution Institution