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Includes the full French text, accompanied by French-English
vocabulary. Notes and a detailed introduction in English put the
work in its social and historical context.
First published in 1985. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor &
Francis, an informa company.
The nineteenth century in France spawned numerous 'fous
litteraires, one of the most fascinating being Jean-Pierre Brisset
(1837-1919). An individualist among individualists, he dismantled
the existing French tongue, reshaping it to suit his own grandiose
purposes, which were to explain afresh the development of human
beings (from frogs) and of their language (from croaks). Continuous
and ubiquitous punning was a unique feature of his writing. In this
study, Redfern examines such themes as the nature of literary
madness, the phenomenon of deadpan humour, the role of analogy, and
the place of institutional religion in Brisset's creative rewritng
of the creation. (Legenda 2001)
The culmination of a lifetime's fascination with humor in all its
forms, this book is the first in any language to embrace such an
impressive span of authors and such a broad range of topics in
French literary humor.
In nine wide-ranging chapters Walter Redfern considers diverse
writers and topics, including: Diderot, viewed as a laughing
philosopher, mainly through his fiction (Les Bijoux indiscrets, Le
Neeu de Rameau, and Jacques le fataliste); humorlessness, corraling
Rousseau, Sade, the Christian God, and Jean-Pierre Brisset; the
aesthete Huysmans, in both his avatars, Symbolist and Naturalist (A
Rebours, Sac au dos, and other texts); the dramatic use of parrots
by Flaubert, Queneau, and Beckett; Valles and la blague;
exaggeration in Valles and Cd'eline (Mort a credit and L'Enfant);
the fiction, plays, and autobiography of Sartre; bad jokes in
Beckett; wordplay in Tournier's fiction (especially Roi des aulnes
and Les Meteores).
Five interleaved "riffs" on laughter, dreams, black humor,
politics, and taste, carry the enquiry into questions of humor
outside of the purely French context, enhancing a book that
impresses as much with its vivacity of style as with the breadth
and depth of its scholarship.
Albert Londres (1884-1932) was a much-translated French
investigative journalist, distinguished by the application of
humour to serious reporting. His journalistic coverage was
extremely wide (Europe, Soviet Russia, the Middle East, the Far
East, Africa, South America), as were his themes: war, revolution,
racism, prison and asylum conditions, the slave trade, colonialism,
sport. This study compares and contrasts Londres with other
globetrotting reporters from France, Britain and the USA who deal
courageously and innovatively with history in the making. The
approach is historical, sociological and rhetorical. The author
investigates the shifting borderline between journalism and
literature and critically examines the numerous cliches about, and
by, journalists.
Stimulating, challenging, engaging, dauntingly well informed and
wide-ranging, Professor Redfern's revised book on puns offers
massive returns both to the specialist researcher and the
interested general reader. Taking his examples back to ancient
literatures, but drawing especially on English, American and French
cultures (popular and high), he defies the way in which the pun has
so often been denigrated as a poor relation within the family of
humorous modes, and his sparkling and inventive prose fully
justifies that approach. Every page offers original examples amid
material from his sources, tellingly examined but without the
dogmatic imposition of a preconceived (and therefore, perhaps,
inadequate) theory. That exclusion, criticised by earlier
reviewers, perceptibly enhances the chapters he presents, which
cover, among other matters, the psychology and psychopathology of
word-play, the history of punning (particularly enlightening on the
English 18th and 19th centuries, though Hugo, Flaubert and others
also figure strongly), how punning links with etymology, anagram,
neologism and rhetorical tropes such as metaphor, irony, litotes
and syllepsis, the commercialisation of puns in the advertising
industry and their exploitation by the press, and an intriguing
extension of wordplay into the visual as developed in film and TV,
as well as by artists like Arcimboldo and Duchamp.
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