Wordplay: A Wry Plod from Babel to Scrabble

This course brings together interesting reading, thoughtful scholarship, and hands-on revelry in the exploration of the ludic side of language. We will consider the formal features, aesthetic pleasures, and societal roles of wordplay from a wide temporal and geographical perspective by reading poetry, stories, and novels both familiar and unfamiliar, having fun with scripts besides our own, and regularly trying to produce decent examples of "constrained writing" ourselves. In the end we will arrive at a better understanding of how language works and how these workings can be bent in unusual ways to produce striking effects.