Academic literature on the topic 'Nonsense literature'

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Sussex, 2008.The thesis outlines the course of Victorian nonsense as a playful form of children's literature since Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll and its resurgence in the modernist novel as a dialogic form of writing that calls attention to the physicality of the text: its texture, sound, shape and colour.

This thesis examines the literary relationship between James Joyce and Victorian nonsense, particularly Lewis Carroll. Tracing the defining characteristics of literary nonsense beyond the Victorian period, it aims to assess what we mean by 'literary nonsense', and to evaluate the terms of Joyce's nonsense inheritance. The thesis is divided into four chapters: Chapter One: "'A letters from a person to a place about a thing": The Nonsense Letter.' This chapter looks at central nonsense themes of miscommunication, the (mis)construction of meaning, textual play, and the inadequacies and absurdities of epistolary conventions. My research draws on personal letters from Joyce, Carroll, and Edward Lear, as well as examining the relationship between fictional letters and their host texts, and delivering a detailed analysis of the Finnegans Wake letter in its various guises. Chapter Two: "'Mocked majesty": Games and Authority.' This chapter explores the various forms of authority in nonsense, from autocratic monarchs to omniscient authors, and from the parental or pedagogic authority of adults over children to the rigid and unspoken rules of children's games and discourses. The various species of games we find in the work of both Carroll and Joyce are analysed, from the tightly ordered playworlds of chess, cards, and games with logic and language, to the rough-and-tumble hijinks of the Finnegans Wake children's twilight street games. Chapter Three: '''Jest jibberweek's joke": Comic Nonsense.' This chapter begins by exploring the Kantian model of incongruous humour we find in the nonsense double act, examining how both Joyce and Carroll emphasise and exploit the double nature of the joke, using it to generate the vaudevillean dialogues and comic contrasts between the many 'collateral and incompatible' pseudocouples who populate the nonsense terrain. It goes on to address the dark underbelly of the comic, identifying a Hobbesian meanness at the heart of nonsense humour. A treatise on the bad pun concludes the. chapter, moving from Carroll's portmanteau words to the pun-infatuated jokescape of Finnegans Wake. Chapter Four: 'Nonsense and the Fall.' This chapter offers a unique reading of literary nonsense asa philosophical answer to the FalL Nonsense texts betray an almost morbid obsession with falling; literal and symbolic falls are a central theme of both the Wake and the Alice books, and falls into language, madness, chaos, and forbidden knowledge are staples of the nonsense condition. Ontological crisis and semantic collapse are among this chapter's themes, as it investigates why it is a general and necessary condition of literary nonsense to be always hovering on the edge of the abyss, and forever toying with its own destruction.

This thesis analyses the difficulties in reading modern poetry that arise out of not the references but the unconventional use of language, and presents them in a theoretical framework based on Julia Kristeva&rsquo<br>s semanalytic theory and Melanie Parsons&rsquo<br>s application of it to a comparison of Nonsense literature and twentieth century poetry. Then aspects of the works of G. M. Hopkins, Dylan Thomas and Edith Sitwell are discussed and poems by these poets are analysed within this framework.

This thesis investigates three major areas in the background of Edward Lear's literary nonsense: the parodic relationship with text and genre of early children's literature, the trends behind Lear's innovative illustration style, and the "nonsense" child construct manifest within the genre, which I claim is, in many ways, an expression of the Romantic conception of the child. The first chapter explores the parodic basis of nonsense. Most literary nonsense is referential; it often begins by inhabiting a genre or individual work, but what it does to the original is debatable. Some critics see nonsense as parody, while others claim that nonsense precludes parody in its intentional purposelessness. In this chapter I explore the critical debate surrounding parody in nonsense, and parody in general. I then examine the works of Lear, and some Carroll, looking first at their genuine, clear parodies. Next, I look at the many borderline cases of parody which use nonsense as a device but are not overshadowed by it. Finally, I discuss the more "pure" literary nonsense which, I argue, goes beyond parody to establish a new genre. The next chapter looks at the background of Lear's nonsense illustration. His style of illustration was a widely original combination of devices which are best seen in the context of the children's book illustrations of his day. With Bewick's innovations in woodcuts, the quality of children's illustrations had drastically improved. Diverging from this trend, Lear's illustrations hearken back to the rough chapbooks which he probably read as a child. His child-like style, coupled with an expert draughtsman's eye, began a rival tradition of children's book illustration. His illustrations are in way caricatures of chapbooks. His text and illustrations, like those of Blake and Hood, are integral, and their self-reflexiveness with the verses places them in an altogether different class of illustration.

Lewis Carroll, and George MacDonald are responsible for some of the most popular yet obscure texts in the English Canon. Because Carroll and MacDonald are often credited with pioneering much of their genres — Nonsense Literature and Fantasy Literature — it seems that often they are labeled as originators, and not as active contributing members of a much larger literary tradition. Carroll and MacDonald were close friends and literary confidants, using each other’s works, as well as employing that of other writers. This is a study of the sources Carroll and MacDonald used in an attempt to better understand the underlying meanings and symbols in some of their works. For example, I study the analogous symbols they utilized, along with the words used to express them, to convey their ideas about identity and metamorphosis. I show that they rely on ancient, complex symbols, and the traditional language and meanings associated with them, to communicate deeply embedded messages to their readers. They employ the symbols of the worm, the chrysalis, and the butterfly, in several different guises, in their complex works. It is these symbols that allowed them to elucidate the concepts of the individual’s initial materialist state, followed by the midway period of dreaming/reflecting, and the subsequent spiritual awakening. The analysis of the literary sources they used helps to uncover symbols and themes of interest for Carroll and MacDonald, which in turn help to expose other of their sources, such as the Bestiaries, biblical stories, and the works of Isaac Watts, and William Blake. I attempt to explain how some of these symbols and themes function in the portrayal of coherent, yet creative, meanings in Carroll’s ‘Nonsense’ and MacDonald’s Fantasy.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of English, 2007.<br>Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-07, Section: A, page: 2960. Adviser: Linda Charnes. Title from dissertation home page (viewed Apr. 10, 2008).

This thesis presents a critical analysis of Deleuze’s philosophy of language, using and examining Russian and Italian futurist manifestos to draw out the ‘futurist’ aspects of Deleuze’s language and thought. These aspects constitute a poetics of Deleuze as well as a poetics of the avant-garde, presenting in both areas the celebrated, utopian state of language as dynamic, performative matter. The way in which futurist manifestos often attempt to perform and demand their aims simultaneously, and the temporal problems which arise due to this, is an operation which can be perceived in Deleuze’s writing. The difference between writing which describes a linguistic practice and writing which performs this linguistic practice is a temporal gap requiring a double operation of description and enactment, which the performative manifesto purports to fulfil. In both Deleuzian and futurist poetics, however, the fulfilment of this double operation can lead to problematic territory. Deleuze presents several linguistic practices in The Logic of Sense which can also be located in the writings of both Russian and Italian futurists, despite the differing political and aesthetic programmes of these variants of the movement. The common element identified and examined in this thesis is an accelerative drive to eliminate the temporal gap between items in an analogical equation so that synonymy is no longer an inexact science; the conjunction and the copula are truncated and cleave together, resulting in radical linguistic becoming. My argument is that minute technical linguistic modifications such as these operate synecdochically within futurist and Deleuze’s poetics, standing for their creators’ entire conceptual systems. Ultimately, the paradoxes inherent in the relationship between the radical fluidity of futurist nonsense and the radical fixity of its ensuing formalism provide a new way of thinking about Deleuze’s approach to language.