French Humour: Papers Based on a Colloquium Held in the French Department of the University of Bristol, November 30th 1996

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John Parkin
Rodopi, 1999 - Literary Criticism - 232 pages

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Contents

ALISON WILLIAMS AND JOHN PARKIN
21
MICHAEL FREEMAN
39
X
58
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Page 100 - ... les autres que dans ces chambres où il faut attendre, pour faire le compliment d'entrée, que les petits chiens aient aboyé. Ce n'est plus pour Diphile un agréable amusement ; c'est une affaire laborieuse et à laquelle à peine il peut suffire. Il passe les jours, ces jours qui échappent et qui ne reviennent plus, à verser du grain et à nettoyer des ordures...
Page 157 - At first it can only be a matter of somehow finding a method by which we can represent this mocking attitude towards the word, through words. In this dissonance between the means and their use it will perhaps become possible to feel a whisper of that final music or that silence that underlies All.
Page 22 - But most intolerable of all is the woman who as soon as she has sat down to dinner commends Virgil, pardons the dying Dido, and pits the poets against each other, putting Virgil in the one scale and Homer in the other. The grammarians make way before her; the rhetoricians give in; the whole crowd is silenced...
Page 102 - II ya une chose que l'on n'a point vue sous le ciel, et que selon toutes les apparences on ne verra jamais : c'est une petite ville qui n'est divisée en aucuns partis, où les familles sont unies...
Page 142 - Laughter arises from the view of two or more inconsistent, unsuitable, or incongruous parts or circumstances, considered as united in one complex object or assemblage, or as acquiring a sort of mutual relation from the peculiar manner in which the mind takes notice of them.
Page 142 - Sudden glory, is the passion which maketh those grimaces called LAUGHTER ; and is caused either by some sudden act of their own, that pleaseth them; or by the apprehension of some deformed thing in another, by comparison whereof they suddenly applaud themselves.
Page 164 - Be subtle, various, ornamental, clever, And do not listen to those critics ever Whose crude provincial gullets crave in books Plain cooking made still plainer by plain cooks, As though the Muse preferred her half-wit sons; Good poets have a weakness for bad puns.
Page 143 - a person appears comic to us if, in comparison with ourselves, he makes too great an expenditure [of energy] on his bodily functions and too little on his mental ones...
Page 106 - Disons-le sans figure: il parle comme un fou, et pense comme un homme sage; il dit ridiculement des choses vraies, et follement des choses sensées et raisonnables: on est surpris de voir naître et éclore le bon sens du sein de la bouffonnerie, parmi les grimaces et les contorsions.
Page 158 - My life, my life, now I speak of it as something over, now as a joke which still goes on, and it is neither, for at the same time it is over and it goes on, and is there any tense for that?

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