Fool

Combining personal narrative, interviews, and literary analysis, Fool elaborates the potential for fool figures from throughout literary history to reconfigure subject-object relations and point toward new possibilities in creative and critical thought. Drawing on Johanna Skibsrud’s experience in clown classes in France and the US, Fool challenges and extends the correlation Theodor Adorno suggests between thinking and clowning. It considers a diverse range of literary and theoretical sources from Richard Wagner’s Parsifal to Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway. The book also refers to a varied cast of literary and historical clowns and fools, including the early Shakespearean actor Richard Tarlton, Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, and Cirque du Soleil’s Shannan Calcutt.Skibsrud elaborates the role of the ‘fool’ and ‘foolishness’ in literature not as an element of a particular work’s content, plot, or style, but instead as a creative mode of thought activated through the reading and writing of literary texts. This innovative book charts new ground in literature, philosophy, and performance studies, and is an invaluable resource for specialists in all three fields.

Johanna Skibsrud is Associate Professor at The University of Arizona. She is the Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning author of numerous works of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction, including The Poetic Imperative: A Speculative Aesthetics (2020), Island (2019), and The Nothing That Is: Essays on Art, Literature, and Being (2019).