fragmentary

For criticism, streaming snippets are now carried along in a fragmentary rush of social media, bumping aside analog writing and reading.

First published in the New Yorker, “The Wife on Ambien” is a fragmentary, oddly compelling riff on marriage.

They show fragmentary urban scenes — a few palm trees illuminated by the glow of an unseen automobile’s headlights, the artist’s bland backyard, some mute shops — but the images aren’t compelling.

Debord’s genius was in seeing that world in its totality and not in the fragmentary form in which it wants to be seen.

But Almodóvar found, on reading the pieces he has collected, that they amount to “a fragmentary autobiography, incomplete and a little cryptic.”