Fellows of Infinite Jest: Literary representations of folly in four early modern European cultures.

My research project looks at the concept of early modern folly as a subversive strand in popular literary and theatrical forms. It deals with entangled literary histories and is nomadic in its core: I have chosen four literary characters that share the qualities of the witty fool, but all come from different cultural, linguistic, and generic traditions. Employing textual and historical analyses and poststructural theory, I am taking each of the characters as a node in a larger network of fools, or a Deleuzean rhizome, and trying to pick up as many strands and connections as I possibly can to create holistic portrayals of these characters that will, hopefully, speak a thing or two not merely about the representations of folly and politics of laughter, but also about the cultures they sprung from and the respective present moments they continue to inform. On theatrical stages and writerly pages of the early modern age, folly was a tool that provided alternative visions of society and had the potential to, if not subvert the dominant narratives, then at least indicate their ruptures and inconsistencies. It was the property of witty, wisecracking jesters, the paradoxical foolosophers with a licence to peek straight into the heart of darkness and extract from it the unvarnished truth. The witty fools of the Renaissance, remarkably popular in their day, continue to inspire delight and joy in readers and theatregoers in our era of advanced postmodernity. Early modern texts saturated with folly travelled to our times, metamorphosed and hybridized, forming rhizomatic connections with various contexts and discourses. Their single permanent characteristic is their fluidity. I am developing the argument of my thesis in five chapters, first of which examines theoretical approaches to the concept of folly in the early modern age and positions it in relation to a particular kind of laughter and madness. The following four chapters resent detailed studies of five literary works: Till Eulenspiegel: His Adventures, The History of Brother Jan Paleček, Marin Držić’s Dundo Maroje and William Shakespeare’s 1 and 2 Henry IV, stressing particularly the importance of the characters of Eulenspiegel, Paleček, Pomet and Falstaff as literary vessels for different perspectives on folly. The main objective of my study is to juxtapose various embodiments of early modern folly in a way that foregrounds differences, both in cultural contexts and in deployment of folly, and to account for their malleability in the textual spaces of negotiation. Overall, my project aims to trace the ways folly and laughter were transformed in the early modern times – from joyful products of carnivalesque culture, to triggers of malicious delight in mockery, and valuable currency in the budding industry of gratuitous entertainment. It will look into present conceptualizations of early modern folly as necessarily joyful, and question to what degree joy, thought as an affirmative fulfilment of potency, can be recovered from the Renaissance discourses of folly. And finally, by examining the feasibility of employing rhizomatic thought and nomadic criticism to account for historical fluidity of textual meanings, it will attempt to understand why praising folly and indulging in it remains a perennial occupation.