Course description
Nonsense is a literary genre that refuses to conform to the expected order of things, pokes fun at logical reasoning, and troubles conventional language use by emphasizing sounds, rhythms, wordplay and the proliferation of sense instead of meanings fixed by grammatical conventions. Nonsense can take many forms, combining a playfulness sprung from oral folk tradition and primary sensory delights of nursery rhymes with intellectual absurdities put in the service of sociopolitical satire or with philosophical attempts to capture the most intense moments of consciousness or the elusive experience of forgetfulness. Nonsense also reveals how translation conceived of in terms of a literal identity of meaning borders on an impossible gambit. Focusing on nonsense literature in English and in translation (including the students’s own) we shall tackle dilemmas related to untranslatability, neologisms, puns, language games, the impossibility of meaninglessness and the necessity of misunderstanding. Topics to be discussed include: the joys of gibberish and Dr Seuss, Victorian nonsense children’s rhymes, limericks and Edward Lear, the imagetextual monstrosity of Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky, absurd tales by Eugene Ionesco and James Thurber, modernist distortions of meaning, time, and memory and Gertrude Stein, Post-war nonsense melancholy in Mervyn Peake and Carl Sandburg, worldmaking through made-up words and Shel Silverstein’s bestiary, and visual and musical nonsense. We shall mostly discuss poems, short stories and tales, primarily but not exclusively from children’s literature. Grading is based on in-class activity, a presentation, home-work assignments, and a brief final seminar paper.
READINGS
Poems for Nonsense Lit Course (reading for the 1st week)
Edward_Lear. A Book_of_Nonsense (1862)
Edward Lear. “The Owl and the Pussycat” (1865) ENG/HUN
Edward Lear. “The Pobble who has no Toes”_ ENG/HUN
Lewis Carroll. The Annotated Alice – includes: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (1872)
Lewis Carroll. “Twinkle, Twinkle, little bat!” in Wonderland (1865)
Hilaire Beloc. The Bad Child’s Book of Beasts (1896)
Gertrude Stein. “Lifting Belly” (1915-17)
Carl Sandburg. Rootabaga Stories (1922)
Mervyn Peake. Ryhmes without Reason. 1944. (extracts)
James Thurber. The 13 Clocks. (1950)
Dr. Seuss. The Cat in the Hat (1957)
Edward Gorey. The Gashlycrumb Tinies (1963)
dont blump the glump! Silverstein
Shel Silverstein. “Ickle Me, Pickle Me, Tickle Me Too” Where the Sidewalk Ends (1974)
Donald Barthelme_”The School” (1976)
Tim_Burton._The_Melancholy_Death_of_Oyster_Boy_and Other Stories. (1997) extracts Oytser online
List of Wizarding Terms in translations of Harry Potter
VIDEOS
Spike Milligan. “On the Ning Nang Nong” (1959) from Everybody Sing! Playschool
David Firth. Salad Fingers (2004)
Tim Burton. The World of Stainboy, Episode 1-6 (2000)
Catherine Tate. The Interpreter Sketch
All Harry Potter Movies in Magic Spells
The Bestiary, video by The History Guy
MUSIC
Misheard lyrics. Soramimi: Karl Orff. Carmina Burana
Coraline Soundtrack. Mechanical Lullaby. Bruno Coulais
Igor Stravinsky. The Owl and the Pussycat
John Rutter. The Owl and the Pussycat
The Owl and the Pussycat. 1952 Animation. halas & Batchelor Collection.
More musical adaptations of The Owl and the Pussycat
Karlheinz Stockhausen. Helicopter String Quartet (1993)
Syllabus
- Orientation
- Introduction to nonsense literature. Jack Prelutsky. “Miss Misinformation”, E. E. Cummings: “anyone lived in a pretty how town,” Richards “Eletelephony”, Lewis Carroll. “The Mad Gardener’s Song,” etc. See 1st reader online.
- Introduction to literary translation: domestication and foreignization, untranslatability, the invisibility of the interpreter, cross-cultural meanings, making sense of nonsense
- The joys of gibberish and lullabies: Dr Seuss. “Fox in Socks”
- Victorian nonsense children’s rhymes: Edward Lear. “The Owl and the Pussycat” (translations by Havasi Attila, Hajnal Anna), musical adaptations, “The Pobble who has no Toes” (translations by Havasi, Varró,)
- Unmaking Meanings at a mad tea party: Lewis Carroll’s “Twinkle, twinkle, little bat!” and its many translations
- Absurd tales. Eugene Ionesco. Stories 1.2.3. James Thurber. The 13 Clocks.
- Modernist distortions of meaning, time, and memory. Gertrude Stein “Lifting belly” Post-war nonsense melancholy. Mervyn Peake. Rhymes without reason. Carl Sandburg. Rootabaga Stories, Donald Barthelme. “The School”
- Worldmaking through neologisms. Wordmagic, Shel Silverstein’s bestiary, the magic spells of Harry Potter’s wizarding world
- Reading in the dark. Nonsense, gothic, death in children’s lit: Edward Gorey. The Gashleycrumb tinies, Tim Burton’s poems
- Visual and musical nonsense: from Malevich to Harriet Russell, from Stockhausen’s Helicopter String Quartet to Eric Satie, Bruno Coulais
- Imagetextual monstrosity in Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky (Weöres, Tótfalusi, Varró, Jónai) Names without a thing: Heffalump, Gruffalo, Cthulchu
- Mini conference, Discussing students’ translations of Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky
Grading policy:
*classroom activity, homework assignments (25%)
*presentation: 10-15 minutes long introductory analysis of a text to be discussed in class + handout in 15 printed copies including the main ideas of your presentation. You can use a PPT or Prezi but you still need the handout (25%)
* final seminar paper (made up of 4 components) (50%):
–1. TRANSLATION component: translate Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky (from English to Hungarian)
–2. LITERARY ANALYTICAL component: write a 3 page-long explanation of your own work (possibly explain the choices you made in your translation (domestication or foreignization, why), comparison (of your translation) with/analysis of other Hungarian translations, commentary on functioning of literary nonsense)
–3. INTERMEDIAL component: your translation of the poem Jabberwocky into another medium: from text to image, to music, to video, etc)
–4. PEDAGOGICAL component: create an exercise for students (you decide which level: elementary/high school or university) dealing with the poem the Jabberwocky
Format: Times New Roman, 12, 1.5 space, consult the online Institute Style Sheet. http://www.ieas-szeged.hu/documents/ Plagiarism is punishable by failure.
Deadline: Nov 26. If you fail to submit this, you fail the class. No deadline extension.
NOTE: Max 3 absences allowed.
Please come to the text prepared, read the short texts before the class and think about them, and make sure to bring the readings with you in class in a printed or an electronic copy.
List of recommended secondary readings
Basnett, Susan & André Lefevere. Constructing Cultures. Essays on Literary Translation. Multilingual Matters, 1998.
Bedamatta, Urmishree. „Playing with Nonsense: Toward Language Bridging in a Multilingual Classroom.” CLELE, 2014
Byrom, Thomas. Nonsense and Wonder: The Poems and Cartoons of Edward Lear. NY: Dutton,1977.
Cammaerts, Emile. The Poetry of Nonsense. London: Routledge, 1926.
Cassin, Barbara ed. Dictionary of Untranslatables. A philosophical lexicon. Translated by Steven Rendall, Christian Hubert, Jeffrey Mehlman, Nathanael Stein and Michael Syrotinski. Princeton University Press, 2015.
Chesterton, Gilbert. ‘A Defense of Nonsense,’ The Defendant. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1914.
Deleuze, Gilles, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, ed. Constantin V. Boundas. London: The Athlone Press, (French version 1969), 1990.
Haughton, Hugh. Introduction to The Chatto Book of Nonsense Poetry. Chatto & Windus, 1988.
Lecercle, Jean-Jacques. Philosophy of Nonsense. The Intuitions of Victorian Nonsense Literature. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Malcolm, Noel, The Origins of English Nonsense. London: Fontana/HarperCollins, 19k97.
May, Leila S. “Language-Games and Nonsense: Wittgenstein’s Reflection in Carroll’s Looking-Glass.“ Philosophy and Literature. Vol. 31, No. 1, April 2007. 79-94.
Mitchell, WJT. “The Unspeakable and the Unimaginable: Word and Image in a Time of Terror.” ELH. Vol. 72. No 2. Summer 2005. 291-308.
Munday, Jeremy. “Translating the Foreign.” Introducing Translation Studies Theories and Applications. London: Routledge. 2001. Chapter 9.
O’Sullivan, Emer. Comparative Children’s Literature. Taylor & Francis, 2005.
Prickett, Stephen, Victorian Fantasy. Hassocks: The Harvester Press, 1979.
Reike, Alison, The Senses of Nonsense. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992.
Reynolds, Kimberley. Radical Children’s Literature. Future Visions and Aesthetic Transformations in Juvenile Fiction. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Sewell, Elizabeth, The Field of Nonsense. London: Chatto and Windus, 1952.
Stewart, Susan, Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1979.
Stoodt, Barbara. Children’s Literature. Macmillan Education AU, 1996.
Tarantino, Elisabetta and Carlo Caruso, Introduction to Nonsense and Other Senses: Regulated Absurdity in Literature. Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishers, 2009
Tigges, Wim, An Anatomy of Literary Nonsense. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988.
Venuti, Lawrence. The Translator’s Invisibility. New York: Routledge, 1995.
