“How would we know when a detail seems really true? What guides us? The medieval theologian Duns Scotus gave the name “thisness” (haecceitas) to individuating form. … Thisness is a good place to start.
By thisness, I mean any detail that draws abstraction toward itself and seems to kill that abstraction with a puff of palpability, any detail that centers our attention with its concretion.” (James Wood, How Fiction Works)
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