The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms - Ross Murfin 2018

Paralipsis

Paralipsis: A rhetorical figure in which a speaker asserts that he or she will not discuss something that he or she in fact goes on to discuss. Alternative spellings of the term include paralepsis and paraleipsis; synonyms include occultatio, occupatio, praeteritio, and preterition.

EXAMPLES: The narrator of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (c. 1383) regularly discusses the subject of love after refusing to do so, citing his own status as a failed lover and deferring to the expertise of his audience.

Marc Antony’s famous speech in William Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar (1598) begins with the declaration “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; / I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him,” then proceeds to praise him anyway.