ABSTRACT
So far, my approach to nonsense has been synchronic. I have analysed the formal characteristics of a genre. The corpus of texts was Victorian, but the object of the analysis was a timeless language game, to be found anywhere and anywhen. What I have conducted is the literary equivalent of a philological study of texts from the point of view of langue, concentrating on the internal coherence of the texts, on the rules and maxims that could be derived from the corpus. The result is a structure, expressed through a number of conceptual dichotomies: ‘I speak language’ v. ‘language speaks’, agon v. irene, subversion and support. We may even go further, as nonsense is doubly concerned with synchrony. Like all genres, it is the object of a synchronic formal analysis; but being a genre that thematises the workings of language, a metalinguistic genre, it welcomes synchronic analysis as particularly adapted to it. There appears to be a reflexive relation between the constitution of the genre and the mode of its analysis.
