Nineteenth-century France spawned numerous 'fous littEraires', one of the most fascinating being Jean-Pierre Brisset (1837-1919). An individualist par excellence, he dismantled the existing French tongue, reshaping it to suit his own grandiose purpose, which was that of explaining the development of human beings from frogs and of their language from croaks. Continuous and ubiquitous punning was a unique feature of his writing. In this study, Walter Redfern examines such themes as the nature of literary madness, the phenomenon of deadpan humour, the role of analogy, and the place of...

The culmination of a lifetime's fascination with humor in all its forms, this book is the first in any language to embrace such an impressive span of authors and such a broad range of topics in French literary humor.
In nine wide-ranging chapters Walter Redfern considers diverse writers and topics, including: Diderot, viewed as a laughing philosopher, mainly through his fiction (Les Bijoux indiscrets, Le Neeu de Rameau, and Jacques le fataliste); humorlessness, corraling Rousseau, Sade, the Christian God, and Jean-Pierre Brisset; the aesthete Huysmans, in both his avatars, Symbolist and...

A study that focuses on the dynamic potentialities of language, whether via the reanimation of moribund ideas or by coinages from scratch. It analyzes such topics as: imitation, rumor, political correctness, jargon, euphemism, plagiarism, stereotyping (rac

Ce livre est une edition francaise repensee et mise a jour de The Dead and the Quick: Cliches and Neologisms in the Written, Spoken and Visual Cultures of Britain, the United States and France (1989, 2e edition 2010).
Walter Redfern considere le langage comme alternativement reactionnaire et revolutionnaire. Les mots sont complices dans le cramponnement humain aux realites perimees, et toutefois le langage ne cesse d evoluer par des processus de deplacement et de remplacement. En sus de la nature apparemment statique des cliches, cette etude se concentre donc sur le potentiel...

Cet ouvrage se propose d etendre le champ d etude du phenomene calembouristique beaucoup plus loin que ne l ont fait les enqueteurs precedents. A cette fin, il s organise de facon chronologique (depuis diverses langues de l Antiquite jusqu aux plus recentes exploitations du jeu de mots), et thematique. Apres la partie historique viennent des chapitres consacres au phenomene dans divers domaines de la vie sociale: litterature, presse, publicite, arts visuels. Des domaines peu etudies par autrui tels que la maladie mentale (y compris les lapsus) et la psychanalyse sont examines du cote malade...