The relevance of irrelevance: Games and puzzles in the humoristic tradition since the renaissance
Year: 1995
Type: article
Abstract: Summary An encyclopedic drive and ironic self‐critical consciousness have informed the humoristic tradition in Western narrative from Rabelais, Cervantes, Grimmelshausen, and Sterne down to Joyce, Mann and Barth. But also copresent at every major stage in the development of humoristic fiction has been a spirit of playfulness that enables dynamic movement toward larger synthesizing vision, as well as the recognition of cultural complexity and error. The ludic principle not only accommodates, but seems to draw creative energies from “irrelevance”, from childish games, human folly, and narrative digression ‐ to name but a few manifestations. Remarkable is the extent to which, because of ludic openness, great humoristic novels have captured so many essentials of revolutions or crises in Western thought ‐ examples range from the comic enactment of the conflict of humanist and medieval values in Rabelais, over the radical deconstruction of literary structures and languages to express the new subjectivist sense of psychological identity in Sterne, to the polyphonic modernist symposium on the possible directions for humanity in Mann and even a postmodern stock‐taking in Pynchon. The ludic principle also appears to link the impressive evolutionary series of humoristic‐encyclopedic works over the past five centuries insofar as these overtly “play” with their own antecedents and thereby constitute an ongoing self‐adjusting textuality.
Source: Journal of Literary Studies
Author: Gerald Gillespie
Institution: Stanford University
Language: English
Subfield: Social Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $388
OpenAlex ID: W1995763200