Wise Fools

The “wise fool” is a paradoxical figure that has fascinated Western writers at least since the Middle Ages. The fool stands outside of social convention and society’s normal hierarchies, and as such serves to highlight problems and contradictions in society itself. His or her folly veils a deeper wisdom. To speak as a fool, however, is also to contend with various forms of explicit or hidden censorship, to find ways to defy and circumvent social norms. We will accordingly look both at individual figures of the fool, as depicted in works (in the case of Cervantes and Dostoyevsky read in excerpted form) from Shakespeare’s King Lear and Cervantes’ Don Quixote, to Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, Georg Büchner’s plays Woyzeck and Lenz and Robert Walser’s short story “The Walk,” to William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber.” In doing so, we’ll investigate prose forms that bring into relief social issues of power, politics, gender, generational conflict, morality, and the relation between the individual and the collective; and ways in which the language of folly itself serves as a model for influential forms of literary experimentation.