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Subject: Humor: Devil's Dictionary of Literary Terms
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THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY OF LITERARY TERMS
[chintz@epas.utoronto.ca]

ATTENTION critics, scholars, writers, paragons of wit!

Does the current crop of literary glossaries, encyclopedias, and
indices make your eyes glaze over?

If so, take heed:  you can finally do something about it!  The editors
of THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY OF LITERARY TERMS have conspired to provide
a public forum for the critical disgruntlement which until now has
been suppressed in the name of scholarly propriety.  Those other
dictionaries have no sense of the inherent absurdity of the academic
study of literature, and therefore don't allow for the scornful
repartee and whimsical commentary which will characterize our dictionary.

You are invited to send us as many original definitions as you wish.
Choose a term, a theoretical approach, or a literary personage, and
let loose a volley of your most scintillating wit.  Be assured that others
will be merrily attacking the literary theories YOU hold most dear.

The completed DICTIONARY will be a compendium of bemused reflections,
pointed critiques and satiric reformulations.  Each definition will
have a by-line to identify its author.  Don't miss the chance to add
your voice to the most heteroglossic glossary ever!

Anything goes, style-wise.  Here are a few sample definitions, but
don't feel obligated to imitate their format:

Allegoresis:  A text-specific form of paranoia, in which the patient
appears to find a rigid structure of meaning beneath the "surface" of
the text.

Baudrillardian:  Someone who may not believe in Santa Claus but
certainly believes in the omnipresence of Disneyland.

Irony: A conjuring.  The true ironist is not the speaker but the
perceiver, who insists on pulling something out of nothing's hat.

MLA:  Hypercarnivalesque.  Attendees display a remarkable disseverment
of the link between the upper, reasoning portion of the body and the
"material bodily lower stratum". Sexuality is the only topic of
discussion here, yet actual sex is regarded as affrontery.  Job
interviews are conducted in hotel rooms which lack beds.

Nothing:  That thing about which everything can be said without fear
of censure, since even the most outrageous statements about it will
still come to naught.

Romanticism:  A term ingeniously devised by literary historians to
describe a movement composed of writers and artists who, if they were
alive today, would immediately and without hesitation dissociate
themselves from each other.

Send your submissions to: chintz@epas.utoronto.ca

The Devil's Dictionary of Literary Terms
(Copyright 1994 Warren Cariou and Carrie Hintz)