Description

Book Synopsis
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.

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments
Part I. Common Sense and Fictive Universes
Chapter 1. Making Common Sense
Chapter 2. Some Operations and Affinities
Part II. Making Nonsense
Chapter 3. Reversals and Inversions
Chapter 4. Play with Boundaries
Chapter 5. Play with Infinity
Chapter 6. The Uses of Simultaneity
Chapter 7. Arrangement and Rearrangement within a Closed Field
Part III. Conclusion
Chapter 8. Change's Sensibility
Bibliography
Index

Nonsense

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    A Paperback / softback by Susan A. Stewart

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      Book details

      Publisher Johns Hopkins University Press
      Published 26 January 1990
      ISBN-13 9780801839818
      978-0801839818
      ISBN-10 0801839815
      Also in:
      Folklore studies / Study of myth

      Description

      Book Synopsis
      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.

      Table of Contents

      Preface
      Acknowledgments
      Part I. Common Sense and Fictive Universes
      Chapter 1. Making Common Sense
      Chapter 2. Some Operations and Affinities
      Part II. Making Nonsense
      Chapter 3. Reversals and Inversions
      Chapter 4. Play with Boundaries
      Chapter 5. Play with Infinity
      Chapter 6. The Uses of Simultaneity
      Chapter 7. Arrangement and Rearrangement within a Closed Field
      Part III. Conclusion
      Chapter 8. Change's Sensibility
      Bibliography
      Index

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