subterraneanity
Language: English
Part of speech: noun
Etymology: From subterranean + -ity.
Senses: examples: text: General social movements, such as those for mental health, peace, or Women’s Liberation, seek to bring about changes in people’s values, both of their members and the public at large. Such movements are often marked by an absence of (1) established leadership, (2) a recognized membership, and (3) clear structural forms for guidance and control. Informality, inconspicuousness, and subterraneanity prevail.
ref: 1976, Alfred H[yman] Katz, Eugene I. Bender, “Self-Help as a Social Movement”, in The Strength in Us: Self-Help Groups in the Modern World, New York, N.Y.; London: New Viewpoints, a division of Franklin Watts, →ISBN, part I (Self-Help in Society—the Motif of Mutual Aid), page 28:
text: to write is to resurface the traumatic subterraneanity of mind.
ref: 1989, Vijay Singh, “Desire”, in Jaya Ganga: In Search of the River-Goddess, New Delhi: Penguin Books India, →ISBN, page 56:
text: [Steve] Chimombo’s poetry is characterised by the practice of geological subterraneanity, a conception of poetic political agency as a constant movement between the terrestrial world of dominant political discourse and the multiple locations provided by the labyrinthine space of pre-colonial myth.
ref: 1995, Mpalive-Hangson Msiska, “Geopoetics: Subterraneanity and Subversion in Malawian Poetry”, in Abdulrazak Gurnah, editor, Essays on African Writing, volume 2 (Contemporary Literature), Oxford, Oxon: Heinemann Educational Publishers, →ISBN, page 73:
text: For example, in / Encyclopedias are gold mines / [David] Rumelhart suggests that the process of comprehension involves applying the schema suggested by the predicate term to the subject term (the term predication itself, as standardly used, implies that characteristic properties of the predicate concept are to be applied to the subject concept). In the present example, there is only a partial fit of those characteristic properties (e.g., “containing hidden riches” fits encyclopedias, “subterraneanity” does not); indeed, such “unevenness of fit” is a key ingredient of metaphoricality, Rumelhart suggests: […]
ref: 1996, Michael Toolan, “Metaphor”, in Total Speech: An Integrational Linguistic Approach to Language (Post-Contemporary Interventions), Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, →ISBN, page 64:
text: The proposed addition is 425,000 square feet, 175,000 square feet in the west side and 250,000 square feet on the east. The west building will be the equivalent of six stories high and eight stories high on the east. These are very, very big buildings and their sheer massiveness will, in my opinion, overwhelm the existing structure. For people inside the stadium, in the seats, the sun will not shine very much, if at all, taking away part of the joy of a beautiful, autumn day in Ann Arbor. Also, as Professor Louis Guenin writes in opposing this plan, the stadium’s architectural greatness is based on its “simplicity, understatement, symmetry, subterraneanity, smoothness, openness, and vastness.” This plan is the antithesis of all of that.
ref: 2006 May 19, Laurence J. Deitch, quotee, “May Meeting, 2006”, in Proceedings of the Board of Regents, Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan, pages 317–318:
text: It is quite plausible to hypothesize that Le Fantôme de l’Opéra, with its history of marginalization, represents the cultural attempt of the nascent bourgeois class to homogenize and «regulate» anything that could disturb the security and balance of the world. In fact, this hypothesis consists in an attempt to recognize, isolate and catalogue the phenomena of diversity, disquieting «subterraneanity» and transgression which began to worry the emerging middle class that was destined to consolidate itself over the course of the Twentieth century – an attempt carried out in the precise cultural space of gothic and horror literature.
ref: 2010, Laura Paola Pellegrini, Le Fantôme de l’Opéra by Gaston Leroux: The Novel’s Evolution and Its Theatrical and Cinematic Adaptations in the Twentieth Century, Milan: Edizioni Universitarie di Lettere Economia Diritto, published 2012, →ISBN, page 15:
text: Underscoring this point, the materiality of the book, which is after all a physical object, signals its unwieldiness in regard to notions of Blackness, sociality, and subjectivity that, often implicitly, foreground dominant societal acts of misrecognition and nonrecognition, such as [Kevin] Quashie’s interiority, Jared Sexton’s subterraneanity, Sarah Jane Cervanak^([sic – meaning Cervenak])’s articulation of outside, and Candace Williamson’s analysis of sociality as another form of interiority.
ref: 2023, Daphne Lamothe, “In Search of Presence: A Digressive Reading of Ordinary Light”, in Black Time and the Aesthetic Possibility of Objects, Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, →ISBN, pages 28–29:
text: I propose that in transposing anarchism’s subterranean fire to [John] Claggart’s tumultuous subjectivity, [Herman] Melville indexes the beginning of the underground’s transformation into “an inside narrative,” in the words of Billy Budd’s subtitle—a figure for interiority that would reach its fullest expression in emerging theories of the unconscious. This is not to say that the expression of the unconscious as subterraneanity was new at the end of the nineteenth century; almost half a century before writing Billy Budd, in Moby-Dick, Melville himself had analogized the workings of “unconscious understandings” to the untraceable shafts dug by “the subterranean miner that works in us all.”
ref: 2023, Lara Langer Cohen, “Subterranean Fire: Anarchist Visions of the Underground”, in Going Underground: Race, Space, and the Subterranean in the Nineteenth-Century United States, Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, →ISBN:
synonyms: subterraneanness
subterraneity
subterraneousness
glosses: The quality of being subterranean.