French Laughter
Literary Humour from Diderot to Tournier
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Product details:
- Publisher OUP Oxford
- Date of Publication 21 February 2008
- ISBN 9780199237579
- Binding Hardback
- No. of pages256 pages
- Size 223x146x19 mm
- Weight 443 g
- Language English 0
Categories
Short description:
The culmination of a lifetime's fascination with humour, Walter Redfern's book treats major French writers from the 18th to the 20th centuries as humorists, including Diderot, Rousseau, Sade, Huysmans, Flaubert, Beckett, and Tournier. He considers irony, hyperbole, wordplay, jokes, dialogue, humour as philosophical speculation, and plagiarism.
MoreLong description:
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.
French Laughter romps through four centuries of literary humour with much wit and word-play along the way... this [is an] impressive and adventurous book.
Table of Contents:
Promises, promises
The Laughing Philosopher: Diderot
Riff on Laughter
The Question of Humourlessness (Rousseau, Sade, God, and Brisset)
Riff on Dreams
Huysmans: Back-to-front, and Back-packing
A Little Bird Tells Us: Parrots in Flaubert, Queneau, Beckett (and Tutti Quanti)
Blague hard! Vallès
Riff on Black Humour
Upping the Anti/e: Exaggeration in Vallès and Céline
Riff on Politics
Drôle de philosophie: Sartre
Bad Jokes and Beckett
Riff on Taste
Approximating Man: Michel Tournier's Play with Words
Inconclusion
Bibliography
