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.
A few more instances . . .
The Vienna Group (Artmann, Ruhm, Jandl et al). I particularly like
Artmann, who seems very various. There's a translation by Rothenberg
(in Poems for the Millennium, II) of a piece from Viennese dialect
that sounds very like Herriman's language in the Krazy Kat cartoon
strips (do they count?). His book Sweat and Industry is, I gather,
hauntingly funny, though I'm baffled and repelled through my lack of
German. It reads very well though, from what I can make out, as a
parody of the parish-pump bucolic which was also common in Irish
writing. (Flann O'Brien's An Beal Bocht [The Poor Mouth] might be
doing something similar.)
Queneau's poetry and fiction deploy humour as a primary mode. (I'll
leave that as I wrote it, as a sample of unintentional pomposity
appropriate to the topic.)
Also, Armand Schwerner's The Tablets is an extremely funny follow-on
from Pound and Olson.
Certainly, as Alison suggests, Beckett, who follows on from Joyce's
stated preference for comedy over tragedy.
I'm getting scrappy now, so I'll stop.
(All male examples, I note. Hmmmph!)
Best,
T
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