French Laughter Literary Humour from Diderot to Tournier [Hardcover]

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, andJacques le fataliste); humorlessness, corraling Rousseau, Sade, the Christian God, and Jean-Pierre Brisset; the aesthete Huysmans, in both his avatars, Symbolist and Naturalist (A Rebours,Sac au dos, and other texts); the dramatic use of parrots by Flaubert, Queneau, and Beckett; Vall?s andla blague; exaggeration in Vall?s and Cd'eline (Mort ? creditandL'Enfant); the fiction, plays, and autobiography of Sartre; bad jokes in Beckett; wordplay in Tournier's fiction (especiallyRoi des aulnesandLes M?t?ores).

Five interleaved riffs on laughter, dreams, black humor, politics, and taste, carry the enquiry into questions of humor outside of the purely French context, enhancing a book that impresses as much with its vivacity of style as with the breadth and depth of its scholarship.

Promises, promises
1. The Laughing Philosopher: Diderot
Riff on Laughter
2. The Question of Humourlessness (Rousseau, Sade, God, and Brisset)
Riff on Dreams
3. Huysmans: Back-to-front, and Back-packing
4. A Little Bird Tells Us: Parrots in Flaubert, Queneau, Beckett (and Tutti Quanti)
5. Blague hard! Vall?s
Riff on Black Humour
6. Upping the Anti/e: Exaggeration in Vall?s and C?line
Riff on Politics
7.Dr'ole de philosophie: Sartre
8. Bad Jokes and Beckett
Riff on Taste
9. Approximating Man: Michel Tournier's Play with Words
Inconclusion
Bibliography

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