Author : Alfred Jarry
Publisher :
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 37,52 MB
Release : 1996
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9781878972071
The singular novel by the legendary author of the play, UBU ROI, is a book that can only be compared to Rabelais or Sterne. FAUSTROLL recounts the adventures of the inventor of PATAPHYSIC, the 'science of imaginary solutions.' Jarry would have found an audience more readily if he had simply written a work of science fiction, a symbolist narrative, a bawdy tale or a spriritual allegory. As it is, FAUSTROLL is all of these at the same time.' - Roger Shattuk'
Author : Christian Bok
Publisher : Northwestern University Press
Page : 133 pages
File Size : 33,20 MB
Release : 2002
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0810118777
'Pataphysics, the pseudoscience imagined by Alfred Jarry, has so far, because of its academic frivolity and hermetic perversity, attracted very little scholarly or critical inquiry, and yet it has inspired a century of experimentation. Tracing the place of 'pataphysics in the relationship between science and poetry, Christian Bök shows it is fundamental to the nature of the postmodern, and considers the work of Alfred Jarry and its influence on others. A long overdue critical look at a significant strain of the twentieth-century avant-garde, 'Pataphysics: The Poetics of Imaginary Science raises important historical, cultural, and theoretical issues germane to the production and reception of poetry, the ways we think about, write, and read it, and the sorts of claims it makes upon our understanding.
Author : Alastair Brotchie
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 426 pages
File Size : 40,18 MB
Release : 2015-08-21
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0262528436
This long-awaited biography of Alfred Jarry reconstructs a life both "ubuesque" and pataphysical. When Alfred Jarry died in 1907 at the age of thirty-four, he was a legendary figure in Paris—but this had more to do with his bohemian lifestyle and scandalous behavior than his literary achievements. A century later, Jarry is firmly established as one of the leading figures of the artistic avant-garde. Even so, most people today tend to think of Alfred Jarry only as the author of the play Ubu Roi, and of his life as a string of outlandish “ubuesque” anecdotes, often recounted with wild inaccuracy. In this first full-length critical biography of Jarry in English, Alastair Brotchie reconstructs the life of a man intent on inventing (and destroying) himself, not to mention his world, and the “philosophy” that defined their relation. Brotchie alternates chapters of biographical narrative with chapters that connect themes, obsessions, and undercurrents that relate to the life. The anecdotes remain, and are even augmented: Jarry's assumption of the “ubuesque,” his inversions of everyday behavior (such as eating backward, from cheese to soup), his exploits with gun and bicycle, and his herculean feats of drinking. But Brotchie distinguishes between Jarry's purposely playing the fool and deeper nonconformities that appear essential to his writing and his thought, both of which remain a vital subterranean influence to this day.
Author : René Daumal
Publisher : Wakefield Press
Page : 113 pages
File Size : 42,16 MB
Release : 2012-04-21
Category : Art
ISBN : 9780984115563
Pataphysics: the science of imaginary solutions, of laws governing exceptions and of the laws describing the universe supplementary to this one. Alfred Jarry's posthumous novel, Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician, first appeared in 1911, and over the next 100 years, his pataphysical supersession of metaphysics would influence everyone from Marcel Duchamp and Boris Vian to Umberto Eco and Jean Baudrillard. In 1948 in Paris, a group of writers and thinkers would found the College of 'Pataphysics, still going strong today. The iconoclastic René Daumal was the first to elaborate upon Jarry's unique and humorous philosophy. Though Daumal is better known for his unfinished novel Mount Analogue and his refusal to be adopted by the Surrealist movement, this newly translated volume of writings offers a glimpse of often overlooked Daumal: Daumal the pataphysician. Pataphysical Essays collects Daumal's overtly pataphysical writings from 1929 to 1941, from his landmark exposition on pataphysics and laughter to his late essay, "The Pataphysics of Ghosts." Daumal's "Treatise on Patagrams" offers the reader everything from a recipe for the disintegration of a photographer to instructions on how to drill a fount of knowledge in a public urinal. This volume also includes Daumal's column for the Nouvelle Revue Française, "Pataphysics This Month." Reading like a deranged encyclopedia, "Pataphysics This Month" describes a new mythology for the field of science, and amply demonstrates that the twentieth century had been a distinctly pataphysical era.
Author : Andrew Hugill
Publisher :
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 43,45 MB
Release : 2012
Category : Arts, Modern
ISBN : 9780262017794
The first complete account in English of the evolution of 'pataphysics from its French origins, with explications of key ideas and excerpts from primary sources, presented in reverse chronological order. Of all the French cultural exports over the last 150 years or so, 'pataphysics--the science of imaginary solutions and the laws governing exceptions--has proven to be one of the most durable. Originating in the wild imagination of French poet and playwright Alfred Jarry and his schoolmates, resisting clear definition, purposefully useless, and almost impossible to understand, 'pataphysics nevertheless lies around the roots of Absurdism, Dada, futurism, surrealism, situationism, and other key cultural developments of the twentieth century. In this account of the evolution and influence of 'pataphysics, Andrew Hugill offers an informed exposition of a rich and difficult territory, staying aloft on a tightrope stretched between the twin dangers of oversimplifying a serious subject and taking a joke too seriously. Drawing on more than twenty-five years' research, Hugill maps the 'pataphysical presence (partly conscious and acknowledged but largely unconscious and unacknowledged) in literature, theater, music, the visual arts, and the culture at large, and even detects 'pataphysical influence in the social sciences and the sciences. He offers many substantial excerpts (in English translation) from primary sources, intercalated with a thorough explication of key themes and events of 'pataphysical history. In a Jarryesque touch, he provides these in reverse chronological order, beginning with a survey of 'pataphysics in the digital age and working backward to Jarry and beyond. He looks specifically at the work of Jean Baudrillard, Georges Perec, Italo Calvino, J. G. Ballard, Asger Jorn, Gilles Deleuze, Roger Shattuck, Jacques Prévert, Antonin Artaud, René Clair, the Marx Brothers, Joan Miró, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, James Joyce, Flann O'Brien, Raymond Roussel, Jean-Pierre Brisset, and many others.
Author : Vincent W. J. van Gerven Oei
Publisher : punctum books
Page : 242 pages
File Size : 27,50 MB
Release : 2018
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 1947447815
What do the bizzare etymologies of Jean-Pierre Brisset, made-up languages for literary fiction, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, Latin grammarians, Horace's Epodes, and the Papyrus of Ani have in common? Nothing! Taken together they provide an unusually coherent picture of a hitherto unacknowledged non-tradition of linguistic investigation. If pataphysics is the science of the singular, the unparallelled, the exception that has no rule, pataphilology is what gets it there, the singularity of singularities. It is the mode in which exceptions become exceptional, itself an unrepeatable intervention in the language. - Back cover.
Author : Alfred Jarry
Publisher : Atlas Press (GB)
Page : 344 pages
File Size : 25,71 MB
Release : 2001
Category : Fiction
ISBN :
The first of two volumes that will finally bring all of Jarry's works into English. It begins with his two privately printed books, Black Minutes of Memorial Sand and Caesar Antichrist; followed by philosophical, practical and aesthetic essays, To be and To Live, Time in Art. It concludes with Jarry's own selection of journalism, texts which indulge in wild speculation and black humour (Andre Breton coined the latter term in order to describe them). This collection helps explain his importance to the appearance of the modern movement in French literature.
Author : Katie L. Price
Publisher : Penn State Press
Page : 500 pages
File Size : 41,18 MB
Release : 2022-03-16
Category : Art
ISBN : 0271091843
In the 1890s, French poet and playwright Alfred Jarry founded pataphysics, the absurdist “science of imaginary solutions,” a concept that has been nominally recognized as the precursor to Dadaism, Surrealism, and the Theater of the Absurd, among other movements. Over a century after Jarry “made the gesture of dying,” Katie L. Price and Michael R. Taylor argue that it is time to take the comedic intervention of pataphysics seriously. ’Pataphysics Unrolled collects critical and creative essays to create an unauthorized account of pataphysical experimentation from its origins in the late nineteenth century through the contemporary moment. Reaching beyond the geographic and cultural boundaries normally associated with pataphysics, this volume presents rich readings of pataphysical syzygy, traces the influence of pataphysics across disciplines and outside of coteries such as the Collège de ’Pataphysique, and asks fundamental questions about the field of modern and contemporary studies that challenge distinctions between the modern and the postmodern, high and low culture, the serious and the comic. Touching on disciplines such as literature, art, architecture, education, music, and technology, this book reveals how pataphysics has been a platform and medium for persistent intellectual, poetic, conceptual, and artistic experimentation for over a century. In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume include Charles Bernstein, Marc Décimo, Adam Dickinson, Johanna Drucker, Craig Dworkin, Catherine Hansen, James Hendler, John Heon, Ted Hiebert, Andrew Hugill, Steve McCaffery, Seth McDowell, Jerome McGann, Anne M. Mulhall, Marcus O’Dair, Jean-Michel Rabaté, Orchid Tierney, and Brandon Walsh.
Author : Faustroll
Publisher : iUniverse
Page : 229 pages
File Size : 20,99 MB
Release : 2004
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0595337457
In the great tradition of Nicolas Flamel and Fulcanelli, the immortal Dr. Faustroll returns to introduce this collection of writings on alchemy, that "secret science" no less mystifying and marvelous than our own art and science, pataphysics. Opening this anthology is Part 1 of Alfred Jarry's delightful last novel, La Dragonne (1907), translated from the French as The She-Dragon, and annotated to highlight some of Jarry's many alchemical allusions. Jarry's comic genius brings to life the inhabitants of a little town in the mountains of Savoy, focusing on gaming activities at and around the local tavern, and an oddly militaristic expectant father. Seven additional writers present their research or reflections on subjects as diverse as Chaucer's Canon's Yeoman's Tale, the bizarre Voynich Manuscript, Gustave Kahn's Tale of Gold and Silence, turn-of-the-20th-century South African statesman Paul Krüger (whose portrait bust appears on the Krügerrand), and symbolic dismemberment; two of these contributors present their work in poetic form, one of them seemingly cursed by alchemy, however benevolently, the other positing seven "easy" steps to completion of the "Great Work." Perhaps you will find yourself entwined somewhere in between, like Mercury's caduceus. For all pataphysicians, alchemists, and symbolists: welcome to the other world.
Author : Jerome McGann
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 227 pages
File Size : 41,97 MB
Release : 2022-12-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1009232975
A long line of traditional, often conservative, criticism and cultural commentary deplored Byron as a slipshod poet. This pithy yet aptly poetic book, written by one of the world's foremost Romantic scholars, argues that assessment is badly mistaken. Byron's great subject is what he called 'Cant': the habit of abusing the world through misusing language. Setting up his poetry as a laboratory to investigate failures of writing, reading, and thinking, Byron delivered sharp critical judgment on the costs exacted by a careless approach to his Mother Tongue. Perspicuous readings of Byron alongside some of his Romantic contemporaries – Burns, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley – reveal Byron's startling reconfiguration of poetry as a 'broken mirror' and shattered lamp. The paradoxical result was to argue that his age's contradictions, and his own, offered both ethical opportunities and a promise of poetic – broadly cultural – emancipation. This book represents a major contribution to ideas about Romanticism.
