Kirjahaku

The culmination of a lifetime's fascination with humour 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 humour. 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); humourlessness, 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; Vallès and la blague; exaggeration in Vallès and Céline (Mort à 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 Météores). Five interleaved 'riffs' on laughter, dreams, black humour, politics, and taste, carry the enquiry into questions of humour 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.

The 19th century in France spawned numerous 'fous litteraires, one of them 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 rewriting of the creation.

This work is a major contribution to the study of cliches and neologisms since it moves beyond considering them separately into their interlinked role in written,spoken and visual cultures in contemporary Britain, France and the United States.The general line of attack is a view of language as both reactionary and revolutionary. Language, Dr. Redfern points out, connives in our clinging to obsolete “realities”, and yet is constantly evolving by processes of displacement and substitution. Despite the allegedly static nature of cliché, this study focuses on the dynamic potentialities of language, whether via the reanimation of moribund ideas or by coinages from scratch.Among the many closely related analyzed in depth are: imitation,rumor, political correctness, jargon, euphemism, plagiarism, stereotyping (racial or otherwise), repetition, and caricature. This leads to a broader assessment of unthinking prose in English and French (“constipated thinking”) as well as various tactics for resisting and countervailing such practices. Linguistic creativity is discussed and the widespread hostility to new words is demonstrated by discussions of language purification and other protection systems.As well as written and spoken forms of cliché and neologism, Redfern studies the visual domain (e.g. kitsch and the neomorphisms of psychotics)in a brief, witty summary of the issues at hand.

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.

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 clich s about, and by, journalists.

Cet ouvrage se propose d' tendre le champ d' tude du ph nom ne calembouristique beaucoup plus loin que ne l'ont fait les enqu teurs pr c dents. A cette fin, il s'organise de fa on chronologique (depuis diverses langues de l'Antiquit jusqu'aux plus r centes exploitations du jeu de mots), et th matique. Apr s la partie historique viennent des chapitres consacr s au ph nom ne dans divers domaines de la vie sociale: litt rature, presse, publicit , arts visuels. Des domaines peu tudi s par autrui tels que la maladie mentale (y compris les lapsus) et la psychanalyse sont examin s du c t malade psychiatrique et du c t m dical. Ce livre se penche galement sur les figures de rh torique qui ont une parent avec le calembour: ironie, tymologie, rime, mots-valises, proverbes, n ologismes, clich s. Il se trouve que le calembour sait d tourner les proverbes pour en faire des perverbes, et r animer les syntagmes endormis. A tour de r le, les cultures anglaise, fran aise et am ricaine fournissent diverses exploitations du jeu de mots. L'auteur s'est efforc de r habiliter une figure jusqu'ici trop souvent d pr ci e.