What might humour and verse have to do with each other? Jokes and poetry seem to sit at opposite ends of a conventional hierarchy of literary forms. Yet, they share a strong history of joint appearances, and one can also liken some of their features. Both humour and poetry gladly violate Grice’s maxims, harnessing language’s shortcomings to produce just the desired amount of ambiguity, presenting us with the pleasure of overlapping or deceptive meanings. Both carefully build their tempo, often towards a climactic moment that French describes with one word for both domains: la chute, literally the fall.
The research team « Mining the Comic Verse » (Le Rire des vers ) is funded for 5 years by the Swiss National Science Foundation, developing tools to address issues of versification and joke-like patterns together.
Please read this paper (Attardo, 2017) in advance.
Presentation
- Presentation slides
- https://slw-comicverse.dslw.unibas.ch/protected/apps/slides/data/2020_12_petr_fub/
Anne-Sophie Bories received her PhD from Université Paris 3 – Sorbonne Nouvelle, after being a visiting researcher at University of California, Berkeley, and at University of Leeds. Her works on poetry take advantage of computational and statistic methods to blend close and distant reading, and address issues of poetics and stylistics. She published a monography in 2020 titled Des Chiffres et des mètres, focused on Raymond Queneau’s poetry. Anne-Sophie is the founder of a network of researchers in computational stylistics, named “Plotting Poetry” which gathers once a year in Europe for a conference.
She is now leading a team at the University of Basel, to explore the interactions between humour and versification in large, digitised corpus, thanks to a generous grant awarded for 5 years by the Swiss National Science Foundation.
Petr Plecháč received his PhDs in Literary Theory and Mathematical Linguistics from Palacký University Olomouc and Charles University in Prague respectively. He's a head of the Versification Research Group at the Institute of Czech Literature, Czech Academy of Sciences and a member of "Mining the Comic Verse" research team at the University of Basel. His main domains of interest are quantitative analysis of poetic texts and stylometry. Petr is a member of the "Plotting Poetry" steering committee and of the Prague Linguistic Circle.
