Description
Book SynopsisFrom 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 ContentsPreface
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
