Home Issues 17 Papers How to mis use language: humor, The literary text is a privileged space for linguistic experimentation and particularly for literary creation, which takes the form of tropes and figures of speech which question the relation between sign and meaning. Her novels show the powerful link between lexical creation, fictional creativity and humor; this article will study the modalities and the consequences of this link.
Garde-toi de rire en ce grave sujet. Boilea u. However, scholars generally agree on the fact that humor is a set of tools that provoke smile or laughter see Defays [ ] and Moura [ 9].
However, literature and linguistic scholars have issued a number of papers, books and essay collections over the past few years about humor, which shows two things: first, there is indeed an interest for academic research on this subject, and second, research on humor is most prolific in literature and linguistic studies 2. These three categories show that creativity and lexical creation rely not only on the invention of new words.
The main reasons why they convey humor is their incongruity, unexpectedness, ambiguity and exaggeration. Rikki Ducornet, an American novelist, has a very peculiar and deeply imaginative way of writing, which recalls her bond with the surrealist movement and relies a lot on these four concepts; three of her novels in particular are filled with useful examples for the study of the link between linguistics, language, literary texts and humor, namely The Stain , The Fountains of Neptune and Phosphor in Dreamland.
This paper will study how Ducornet uses these devices and how linguistic manipulations generate humor in her novels, focusing first on the link between creativity and lexical creation, humor and fictional creation. This will lead to the study of the roles of humor and lexical creation in her novels, and finally to a reflection on the metafictional and metalinguistic comments on language creation displayed by her novels.
