This book deals with a topic that is gaining increasing critical attention, the literature of nonsense and absurdity. The volume gathers together twenty-one essays on various aspects of literary nonsense, according to criteria that are deliberately inclusive and eclectic. Its purpose is to offer a gallery of 'nonsense practices' in literature across periods and countries, in the conviction that important critical insights can be gained from these juxtapositions. Most of the cases presented here deal with linguistic nonsense, but in a few instances the nonsense operates at the higher level of the interpretation of reality on the part of the subject - or of the impossibility thereof. The contributors to the volume are established and younger scholars from various countries. Chronologically, the chapters range widely from Dante to Vaclav Havel, and offer a large span of national literatures (Czech, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese) and literary genres (poetry, prose, and drama), inviting the readers to trace their own pathway and draw their own lines of connection. One point that emerges with particular force is the notion that what distinguishes literary nonsense is its somehow 'regulated' nature. Literary nonsense thus sounds like a deliberate, last-ditch attempt to snatch order from the jaws of chaos - the speech of the 'Fool' as opposed to the tale told by an idiot. It is this kind of post-Derridean retrieval of choice as the defining element in semantic transactions which is perhaps the most significant insight bequeathed by the study of nonsense to the analysis of poetry and literature in general.
Author(s): Elisabetta Tarantino (Author, Editor), Carlo Caruso (Editor)
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Year: 2009
Language: English
Pages: 434
City: Newcastle-upon-Tyne
Tags: nonsense, absurdity, literature, literary criticism
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface........................................................................................................ ix
Acknowledgements .................................................................................. xix
Introduction ................................................................................................ 1
The Nose of Nonsense
Giuseppe Antonelli
SECTION I: NONSENSE VERSUS GODLINESS
Chapter One............................................................................................... 25
“Pape Satàn, pape Satàn aleppe!” (Inferno 7:1) in Dante’s
Commentators, 1322–1570
Simon Gilson
Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 55
“Between Peterborough and Pentecost”: Nonsense and Sin in William
Wager’s Morality Plays
Elisabetta Tarantino
SECTION II: "THERE, TAKE MY COXCOMB": LANGUAGE
GAMES AND SUBVERSION IN EARLY MODERN LITERATURE
Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 89
Off the Paths of Common Sense: From the Frottola to the per motti
and alla burchia Poetic Styles
Michelangelo Zaccarello
Chapter Four............................................................................................ 117
François’s Fractured French: The Language of Nonsense in Rabelais
Barbara C. Bowen
Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 127
Performing Nonsense in Early Seventeenth-Century France:
vi Table of Contents
Chapter Six.............................................................................................. 147
Nonsense and Liberty: The Language Games of the Fool
in Shakespeare’s King Lear
Hilary Gatti
SECTION III: THE MEANING(LESSNESS) OF
MEANING(LESSNESS): MODERNIST NONSENSE
Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 163
Nonsense and Logic in Franz Kafka
Neil Allan
Chapter Eight........................................................................................... 181
Apollinaire and the Whatnots
Willard Bohn
Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 191
“Neither parallel nor slippers”: Dada, War, and the Meaning(lessness)
of Meaning(lessness)
Stephen Forcer
Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 207
The “Wippchen” to Mysticism: Nonsense and Children’s Language
in Fritz Mauthner and German Nonsense Poetry
Magnus Klaue
Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 227
Nonsense, Ban, and Banality in Schwitters’s Merz
Julia Genz
Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 237
Buildings and Urine: Japanese Modernist Nansensu Literature
and the Absurdity of 1920s and 1930s Tokyo Life
Alisa Freedman
SECTION IV: TAKE CARE OF THE SOUNDS: REAL NONSENSE
Chapter Thirteen...................................................................................... 259
Nonsense and Other Senses
Marijke Boucherie
Nonsense and Other Senses vii
Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 275
From Limerick to “Rimelick”: The Finnish Nonsense Limerick
and Its Transformations
Sakari Katajamäki
Chapter Fifteen ........................................................................................ 295
Meaning less: Giorgio Manganelli’s Poetics of Nonsense
Florian Mussgnug
Chapter Sixteen ....................................................................................... 313
Intercultural Nonsense? The Humour of Fosco Maraini
Loredana Polezzi
Chapter Seventeen................................................................................... 335
Fantastica as a Place of Games: Nonsense in the Works of Michael Ende
Rebekka Putzke
SECTION V: NONSENSE, POLITICS, AND SOCIETY
Chapter Eighteen ..................................................................................... 357
Nonsense and Politics
Jean-Jacques Lecercle
Chapter Nineteen..................................................................................... 381
Sergio Tofano’s Vispa Teresa between Parody and Nonsense
Federico Appel
Chapter Twenty ....................................................................................... 399
Nonsense as a Political Weapon in Václav Havel’s “Vanek Plays”
Jane Duarte
Contributors............................................................................................. 415
Index........................................................................................................ 421
