Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1980. — 228 p.From a "comic strip" papyrus dating from Egypt's New Kingdom to the works of Stein, Joyce, and Barth, "nonsense" texts reveal a set of possibilities as rich and complex as the more conventional system of "making sense" from which they are derived. Examining palindromes, children's rhymes, puns, anagrams, code languages, and other texts, Susan Stewart explores the labyrinthine relationships between common sense and nonsense - and presents an original contribution to the fields of folklore, literary theory, anthropology, and sociology by analyzing nonsense within an expansive context of the social manufacture of order and disorder.Preface
Acknowledgment
Common sense and fictive universe
Making common sense
Some operations and Affinities
Making nonsense
Reversals and inversions
Play with boundaries
Play with infinity
Uses of simultaniety
Arrangement and rearrangement within a closed field
Conclusion
Cange's sensibility
Bibliography
Index
