English Thesis 2008

With Friday’s presentation at the Department Colloquium, this thesis will be officially done. Sense and Nonsense is over.

Does anyone know of any good humor theorists, specifically ones who engage with the idea of the ’straight man’ in jokes/deadpan humor? I’ve got some good psychological analyses of humor (Freud, for example) that are working for now, but I’d love to get some more information into my revised chapter.
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As with the previous chapter, I’m having some difficulty coming up with a term for the new category of nonsense I’m discussing. I want to call it “metaphoric nonsense,” which is to say the type of nonsense that has to do with the inversion or destruction of common metaphors (ex. “I beg your pardon?” “It […]

Putting aside the re-collector (for now) and turning to the so-called “religion” chapter, I think that the spiritual hinge in the Proustian moment is Time. Perhaps the entire chapter will deal only with the Time Regained moment- each time I re-read those thirty or so pages I find about thirty absolutely new ideas and directions […]

After a few weeks of completely non-academic, perhaps even mindless pursuits, getting back into thinking about nonsense is proving a bit tough. lots of stop-and-go at this point. But I’ve managed to think of a few questions and problems related to chapter 2, and, as I always do with questions that get too complex for […]

I solved the biggest problem I’ve had with Hamlet since I ever first read it in my senior year of high school.  This is damn amazing and really worthwhile, and solves most of my problems with the ending of the play (always difficult to account for) and may make my thesis sort of actually a […]

Well, I may not being using Norton Juster’s The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics, but why not post the video for people to enjoy/tell me about the nonsensical aspects of.

Ok, it seems that I remember the blog when there’s something big picture to deal with. I’m going to stop thinking about the endless revisions to the collection chapter, and revisit what I see the end result to be.
The introduction will perhaps be a good place to define a lot of terms I’ll use, in […]

The polished draft of the first chapter is due in a week, and with that done (or at least put aside for a bit ’cause its beginning to seep unhealthily into my psyche) its time to move on to the next section–Puns!
This chapter’s proving a bit tougher to start than the previous one, mostly because […]

While revising my chapter on “structural nonsense” (that term is a whole separate issue itself), I’ve come across a snag. During peer review, many people pointed out that one of the roles of structural nonsense’s confusion of defining parametric systems in the novel draws attention to the arbitrary nature of lifeworld parametric systems (the arbitrary […]