Meanings
- uncountablethe study in literature of juxtaposition in text and semantics.
Similarly, Dante's intertextual method in constructing his poem can be compared to the modern concept of bricolage, but it is more appropriate to evince here Shoaf's concept of juxtology, a practice by which diverse materials and concepts are linked together in medieval texts.
1997, M. Keith Booker, Joyce, Bakhtin, and the Literary Tradition: Toward a Comparative Cultural Poetics, University of Michigan Press, page 1042 more examples
1989 R.A. Shoaf, "Medieval Studies After Derrida, After Heidigger," in Julian N. Wasserman, Sign, Sentence, Discourse: Language in Medieval Thought and Literature, Syracuse University Press, 1989. Juxtology emerges from the ancient epistemology of knowledge by contraries and pursues, by comparisons - be they of thinkers and their ideas or of the minutest items of a text, syllables and even individual letters - the aleatory juxtapositions of minds or of sounds that produce the phenomena of meanings. So doing, juxtology recognizes the ontology of error and its necessity: we humans come to the truth only by wandering.
2001 James L. Paxton, "Inventing the Subject and the Personification of Will in Piers Plowman," in Kathleen M. Hewett-Smith, William Langland's Piers Plowman: A Book of Essays, Psychology Press, 2001. Page 225. The allegorical tropes paranomasia and syllepsis, or rather, their compositional practice juxtology, situates Langland's cognitive allegory in the context of the poet's social and political obsession - ...
Origin
Combination of juxta- (“alongside”) + -ology ("study of"). Apparently coined by R. Allen Shoaf in the 1980s
Full word history & related roots →Cite this entry
juxtology. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 3, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/juxtology
“juxtology.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/juxtology. Accessed November 3, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “juxtology,” accessed November 3, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/juxtology.
Source: juxtology on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.