Nonsense Literature Bibliography

Baacke, Dieter. “Spiele jenseits der Grenze. Zur Phänomenologie und Theorie des Nonsens.” Deutsche Unsinnspoesie. Ed. Klaus Peter Dencker. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1978.

Baier, A.C. “Nonsense.” Macmillan Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 1967.

Blumenfeld, Walter. Sinn und Unsinn. Munich: Ernst Reinhard, 1933.

Chaouli, Michel. “Die ‘Verwandtschaftstafeln der Buchstaben’ und das Produktion von Sinn und Unsinn in der Literatur.” In: ‘Fülle der Combination’: Literaturforschung und Wissenschaftsgeschichte. Ed. Bernhard J. Dotzler and Sigrid Weigel. München: Fink, 2005.

Conley, Tim. "‘Oh Me None Onsens!’: Finnegan's Wake and the Negation of Meaning." James Joyce Quarterly 39.2 (Winter 2002): 233–49.

Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.

Dolitsky, Marlene. “The Translation of Nonsense.” Babel 34.2 (1988): 80-89.

-----. Under the Tumtum Tree: From Nonsense to Sense. Studies in Non-automatic Comprehension. Amsterdam: J. Benjamins, 1984.

Flescher, Jacqueline. “The Language of Nonsense in Alice.” Yale French Studies 43 (1969/70): 128-44.

Forster, Leonard. Poetry of Significant Nonsense. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962.

Fowler, Roger. “On the interpretation of ‘nonsense strings.’ ” Journal of Linguistics 5 (1969): 75-83.

Heyman, Michael Benjamin. Isles of Boshen: Edward Lear’s Literary Nonsense in Context. Diss. University of Glasgow, 1999.

Holquist, Michael. “What is a Boojum? Nonsense and Modernism.” Yale French Studies 43 (1969/70): 145-164.

Kemeny, Tomasso. “Il motto di spirit e il nonsense.” La comunicazione spiritosa. Florence: Sansoni, 1982. 217-37.

Köhler, Peter. Nonsens. Theorie und Geschichte der literarischen Gattung. Heidelberg: Carl Winter 1989.

Lang, Peter Christian. Literarischer Unsinn im späten 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert: systematische Begründung und historische Rekonstruktion. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1982.

Lecercle, Jacques. Philosophy of Nonsense: The Intuitions of Victorian Nonsense Literature. London: Routledge, 1994.
 

-----. Philosophy through the Looking-Glass: Language, Nonsense, and Desire. La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1985.

-----. “ ‘The boy stood on the burning deck’: Poetique du nonsense.” Etudes Anglaises 57.1 (2004): 7-31.

Liede, Alfred. Dichtung als Spiel: Studien zur Unsinnspoesie an den Grenzen der Sprache. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1963.

Menninghaus, Winfried. In Praise of Nonsense: Kant and Bluebeard. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.

Orero, Pilar. The Problem of Translating “Jabberwocky”: The Nonsense Literature of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear and Their Spanish Translators. Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellon Press, 2007.

Parsons, Marnie. Touch Monkeys: Nonsense Strategies for Reading Twentieth-Century Poetry. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994.

Petzold, Dieter. Formen und Funktionen der englischen Nonsense-Dichtung im 19. Jahrhundert. Nürnberg: Verlag Hans Carl, 1972.

Reichert, Klaus. Lewis Carroll: Studien zum litarischen Unsinn. Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1974.

Reike, Alison. The Senses of Nonsense. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992.

Reinhart, Tanya. “Patterns, Intuitions, and the Sense of Nonsense: An Analysis of Cummings’ ‘anyone lived in a pretty how town.’ ” PTL: A Journal for Descriptive Poetics and Theory 1 (1976): 85-103.

Rose, Adam. “Lewis Carroll’s ‘Jabberwocky’: Non-sense not Nonsense.” Language and Literature 4.1 (1995): 1-13.

Rother, James. “Modernism and the Nonsense Style.” Contemporary Literature 15 (1974): 187-202.

Schuhmann, Klaus. “ ‘Wir glätten weinend unsre Bügelfalten’: Galgendichters Widerhall bei Expressionisten und Dadaisten.” Neue Deutsche Literature 45.3 (1997): 67-76.

Sewell, Elizabeth. The Field of Nonsense. London: Chatto & Windus, 1952.

-----. “ ‘In the Midst of his Laughter and Glee’: Nonsense and Nothingness in Lewis Carroll.” Soundings 82 (1999): 541-71.

Shires, Linda M. “Fantasy, Nonsense, Parody, and the Status of the Real: The Example of Carroll,” Victorian Poetry 26.3 (1988): 267-283.

Stemmler, Theo and Stefan Horlacher. Sinn im Unsinn: Über Unsinnsdichtung vom Mittelalter bis zum 20. Jahrhundert: 9. Kolloquium der Forschungsstelle für Europäische Lyrik. 1997

Stewart, Susan, Nonsense. Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979.

Tigges, Wim. An Anatomy of Literary Nonsense. Rodopi: Amsterdam, 1988.

-----, ed. Explorations in the Field of Nonsense. Rodopi: Amsterdam, 1987.

Learning teaching

I'm discovering that when I teach I have a tendency to assume that my students learn the same way I do. I assume that they are capable and motivated to learn on their own. That my job is mostly just to facilitate the process, to provide them with a chance to practice speaking and to answer questions as someone who simply has more information than they do. Not that they need me to tell them how to learn, to give them material to practise on their own. I tend to overestimate rather than underestimate their ablities. I tend to assume that grammatical explanations help rather than confuse. Because this is how I myself learn best. By being challenged. By understanding the rules behind the things we say. This is a very analytical approach, and I know that some people learn best intuitively, through doing not by thinking. But I'm not so good about applying this in my own teaching.

I recently started working with a student from a very different background - an immigrant from Mexico - and I'm discovering just how much of a difference that makes. Sometimes I feel like we speak different languages, and not just because I know no Spanish. We come from different worlds. I need to learn to be flexible, to teach for other learning styles.

Derek Walcott; oder, wie man nach Gedichten angelt

Night Fishing (Derek Walcott)

Line, trawl for each word
with the homesick toss
of a black pirogue anchored
in stuttering phosphorus.

The crab-fishers’ torches
keep to the surf’s crooked line,
and a cloud’s page scorches
with a smell of kerosene.

Thorny stars halo
the sybil’s black cry
“Apothanein thelo
I am longing to die.”

But line, live in the sounds
that ignorant shallows use;
then throw the silvery nouns
to open-mouthed canoes.

The movement of the poem fascinates me, the interweaving of the images of sailing and fishing with the vocabulary of writing and reading. The Greek words rise up unexpectedly out of the verses like the captured fish, framed by the rhyming pairs of the third strophe. This single line evoking so much, layers of poetic tradition. Not just the Sybil, the prophetess mentioned in the Satyricon of Petronius, but also T.S. Eliot, who quotes the Greek lines at the beginning of his "Wasteland".

And yet in the final strophe of the poem, Walcott defends the "ignorant" language of his homeland, not denying the existing tradition (he still throws the captured words of the past into his hungry boat), but nonetheless choosing a different path.

I tried for a long time to translate this into German simply because the layers of meaning and the use of polysemy intrigues me so much, but I've concluded that my skills aren't adequate to the task.

Die Wirkung des Gedichts hängt mit der Mehrdeutigkeit des Wortes "line" zusammen, das Wort zieht sich wie ein roter Faden durch das Gedicht und hielt es zusammen. Im ersten Vers schmelzen die Bilder des nächtlichen Fischfangs mit Worten aus dem Bereich des Dichtens und Schreibens zusammen. Und genau diese Mehrdeutigkeit fehlt im Deutschen.

Die Doppeldeutigkeit des ersten Wortes, „line“, das „Vers“ sowie auch „Angelschnur“ bedeuten kann, wird hervorgehoben, ins Spielen gebracht durch die Verbindung von „trawl“ (aus der Fischerwelt) und „word“ (ein sprachliches Begriff). Man könnte hier vielleicht mit der lautlichen Ähnlichkeit des Paars „Strich/Strick“ spielen, sonst bleibt „Faden“ wahrscheinlich die beste Option.

Zwei Reihen von Bilder werden dicht zusammengeflechtet. Die Durchdringung von Landschaft und Dichtung lässt sich unterschiedlich interpretieren, unter anderen als poetologische Metapher für den Prozeß des Dichtens und den Umgang des Dichters mit der Tradition.

Die erste Strophe beschreibt ein unsicheres Herantasten, ein visuell-verbales Suchen "anchored in stuttering phosphorus". Die Vers-Angelschnur wird ins Meer geworfen, der Dichter sehnt sich nicht nur nach Heimat sondern nach einer Sprache und einer Dichtung, die er sein eigenes nennen kann.

Die zweite Strophe beschreibt nicht das Schreiben, sondern das Lesen von Texten. (Das "Wolkenblatt" kommt auch anderswo bei Walcott vor, zum Beispiel im ersten Gedicht des Bandes "Midsummer"). Aber es ist nicht nur ein Lesen von fremd-verfassten Texten, sondern die Landschaft wird auch zum Text, zum etwas Lesbares. Am nächsten wäre hier die alte Bedeutung von "lesen" -- "sammeln, ernten" -- zu benutzen, um die Metapher auszudrücken.

Das plötzliche Auftauchen von fremden Worten in der Mitte des Gedichts, das "schwarze Geschrei", das im Gehör bleibt, wie ein Gespenst.

Aristotle & Semantics (V)

(It seems that I never got around to posting the continuation of this series. So here is the much-belated final installment.)

De Partis Animalibus I, 1. 640b 31 – 641a 5

φησὶ γοῦν παντὶ δῆλον εἶναι οἷόν τι τὴν μορφήν ἐστι ὁ ἀνθρωπος, ὡς ὄντος αὐτοῦ τῷ τε σχήματι καὶ τῷ χρώματι γνωρίμου. καίτοι καὶ ὁ τεθνεὼς ἔχει τὴν αὐτὴν τοῦ σχήματος μορφήν, ἀλλ’ ὅμως οὐκ ἔστιν ἄνθρωπος. ἔτι δ’ ἀδύνατον εἶναι χεῖρα ὁπωσοῦν διακειμένην, οἷον χαλκῆν ἤ ξυλίνην, πλὴν ὁμωνύμως, ὥσπερ τὸν γεγραμμένον ἰατρόν. οὐ γὰρ δυνήσεται ποιεῐν τὸ ἑαυτῆς ἔργον, ὥσπερ οὐδ’ αὐλοὶ λίθινοι τὸ ἑαυτῶν ἔργον, οὐδ’ ὁ γεγραμμένος ἰατρός. ὁμοίως δὲ τούτοις οὐδὲ τῶν τοῦ τεθνηκότος μορίων οὐδὲν ἔτι τῶν τοιούτων ἐστί, λέγω δ’ οἷον ὀφθαλμός, χείρ.

He [Demokritos] says that it is clear to each what sort of thing man is in respect to his form, since he is recognizable as being such by his shape and color. However, a dead body also has the same form and shape, but nevertheless is not a man. Moreover, it is impossible [for something] in any way to be a hand, if it is made of bronze or wood, except homonymously, the way a doctor drawn in a picture [is a doctor]. For it will not be able to do its own work, just like a stone flute or a painted doctor cannot perform their functions. Like them, none of the parts of a dead body – say, an eye or a hand – are still of a sort sufficient [to do this].

ὁμωνύμως as it is used here might easily be translated “by analogy”.

Aristotle’s teleological view of nature is particularly evident in this passage, and his assertion that a dead body is not a man must be understood in terms of the fundamental philosophical distinction he draws between potentiality and actuality. He is not talking about language use per se, but using names in a specific, restricted sense to make an analytical point.

Semantically, the passage is interesting, however. Although modern descriptive linguistics rejects the assumption that some uses of words are “more proper” than others, nevertheless, certain senses of words seem to be more central than others. For example, certain kinds of birds seem to be more typically “birdlike” than others (a robin as opposed to a penguin or ostrich). These prototypes should not be confused with biological classification: a whale fits our concept of “fish” in many ways better than our concept of “mammal” (Saeed 37). Something similar seems to happen when we return to Aristotle’s own examples, although the problem is a bit different. The use of “flute” to describe a semblance made of stone feels somehow metaphorical; the sense, in any case, is different than when it is used for a musical instrument, and the stone flute tends to feel less properly a flute than the ‘real’ flute, as our language use when talking about the two demonstrates. Similarly, although Aristotle’s argument about a dead body not being a man is unlikely to be acceptable to most people in a linguistic sense, as we regularly think about and refer to corpses as men (albeit dead ones), on another level Aristotle seems to have a point. A dead man is not a man in the same way that a living, adult human being is; the meaning is less central and requires qualification to make the distinction. What this suggests is interesting; namely, that language is sensitive to the distinction Aristotle makes between having merely the form of something, and having the function as well

King John

This is a somewhat odd play from Shakespeare, but I think it is precisely its oddness which makes it relevant today. His king is not portrayed as a "great" figure (whether for good or for bad), as one expects from the tragedies and histories. Instead, the plot resembles nothing so much as a family quarrel, played out over the battleground of France. The two queens hatred for one another seems oddly unmotivated; indeed, we learn little about the motivations of the characters throughout the play. King John's death at the end is equally random. It is not the result of an intrigue that has developed throughout the play, or at least not one which we, the audience have been made party to. We simply learn that he has been poisoned, and he comes onstage to die.

Our sympathy instead lies with the ordinary people, those who must suffer from the power struggles and personal feuds of kings, and those from whose perspective, I suspect, the play is presented: the townspeople of Algiers, who close their gates to the kings who are battling over their town like some choice plaything (those who have suffered through a particularly vicious election may sympathize with this decision); Hubert, who must make the choice of obeying the king or acting according to his conscience when asked to kill young Arthur, and whom the king subsequently berates for not preventing him (the king) from giving the order to do so when Arthur's death turns out to have been a bad political decision. And of course the Bastard, who provides an ironic commentary on the events as they happen. Here, too, the royals appear like spoiled children under whose power their subjects must suffer.

Celan's Jabberwocky Translation

Funklös, so war's, und Glitschodeme
Rotierten und raplantschten rum,
Das Burgtier tat, als ob's sich schäme,
Ein Ratz war laut und einer stumm.
(trans. Paul Celan & Guido G. Meister, 1964)

(the original)
`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

(For comparison with other German translations of the poem, see here.)

Although few would likely wish to call Celan's writing nonsense poetry -- there is little that is playful about his experiments with language -- it is unsurprising that he would have found the work of Carroll and Khlebnikov intriguing. (I'll see if I can find and post a sample of his Khlebnikov translations at some point, although my Russian would probably not be adequate to comment on the original).

What is particularly interesting about this translation is that, as Olschner (from whose study the poem fragment is taken) rightly observes, it is not necessarily immediately recognizable as the opening of Jabberwocky, except for the plethora of neologisms. The situation it describes does not seem to be Carroll's pseudo-pastoral landscape, but something different, particularly in the second half of the quartet.

The sense of a shift in meaning from the original is of course typical of Celan's translations. While he generally maintains the words which appear in the original, and frequently syntactical or rhetorical figures as well, there is often a sense that the poem has been taken apart and put back together in such a way that new sets of meaning come to the surface.

In relation to nonsense poetry, it is significant that this effect can still be produced even when there are few recognizable content words. Carroll provides certain cues -- eg. the "'twas" at the beginning, the inverted word order in line three -- which mimic specific literary conventions and encourage us to read the poem a certain way. Celan departs from his model partly by omitting thes cues, partly by making syntactical changes in the poem. He breaks up the simple coordination of the first line with the "so war's" and again in line three by adding a subordinate clause. In lines three and four he replaces a nonsense adjective and a nonsense verb with actual German words, and adds a contrast in line four where none exists in the original. Incidentally, neither "schämen" or "laut/stumm" are associations that seem likely to occur to an English speaker presented with "mimsy" and "outgrabe". Line two, with its motion verbs and alliteration, comes closest to the effect created in Carroll's poem. Some of the neologisms are quite clever -- "Burgtier" for "borogove", "Glitsch-" for "slithy". One is inclined to conclude that Celan here, as so often, is transforming the poem as much as translating it.

References: Olschner, Leonard Moore. Der feste Buchstab. Erläuterungen zu Paul Celans Gedichtübertragungen. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1985.

Verzögerungen

Ich denke ernsthaft daran, für eine Promotionsstelle zu bewerben. Die Gründe, warum ich mich dagegen entschieden habe, sind nach wie vor gültig. Trotzdem: I feel like a cop-out. Als ob ich einfach zu feig war. Die Angst, dass ich nach der Promotion scheitere, ist groß. Und dann wäre ich noch weniger als jetzt in der Lage, Arbeit zu finden. Deshalb der Wunsch zu beweisen, dass ich etwas anderes tun kann.

Aber ich habe mich auch mit diesem Beruf identifiziert. Mich als Akademiker verstanden. Ich wäre gern Professor geworden. Den Traum aufzugeben -- und nicht weil ich etwas anderes gefunden habe, das mir lieber ist, sondern einfach weil ich mich nicht traue, es zu schaffen -- bedeutet, sich zu sagen: ich bin nicht gut genug, ich bin der Herausforderung nicht gewachsen.

Ich merke schon, dass ich aufs Lernen nicht konzentrieren kann: Wozu, wenn das einzige, was ich wirklich gut tun kann, nicht mehr nötig ist?

Ich habe das Gefühl: nur an der Uni gibt es Arbeit, die allein ich leisten kann. Die Frage, ob die Welt wirklich noch einen Germanisten nötig hat, ist berechtigt. Wer die Welt verändern will, soll einen anderen Beruf finden. Aber es geht hier eher um etwas anderes. Ich habe hier etwas zu sagen, was sonst niemand sagen wird.

Und jetzt, als es unmöglich aussieht, diesen Beruf auszuüben und das eigene Leben zu gestalten wie ich will, fällt es mir schwer, sich von diesem Traum zu verabschieden.

Die Abschlussfeier rückt heran, und ich denke an die Professoren, die an mich geglaubt haben. Die mich unterstützt haben. Ich hätte es so gern, dass sie über mich sagen könnten, ich werde nun als Doktorandin an einer guten Uni studieren. Ich bin sonst nicht ehrgeizig, aber ich will, dass sie stolz auf mich sein können. Weil ich gute Aussichten vor mir habe. Stattdessen habe ich das Gefühl, ich enttäusche sie und mich. Als ob ich versagt habe.

Da ich ja sagen muss: ich weiss nicht, wie es weiter geht.