Elizabeth:
>I'd be interested in recommendations of places where humour has been
>deployed in innovative / experimental writing, to what effects. Maybe
>tomorrow I can manage to nominate an example.
While I'm not sure what sort of time-span you have in mind, Breton's
Anthology of Black Humour (1939 & 1966) would surely be a touchstone?
"Black humour is hemmed in by too many things, including stupidity,
skeptical sarcasm, light-hearted jokes . . . (the list is long). But
it is the mortal enemy of sentimentality, which seems to lie
perpetually in wait - sentimentality that always appears against a
blue background - and of a certain short-lived whimsy, which too
often passes itself off as poetry, vainly persists in inflicting its
outmoded artifices on the mind, and no doubt has little time left in
which to lift toward the sun, from amid the poppy seeds, its crowned
crane's head." (From Breton's original Introduction)
Best,
T
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