Gershon legman biography examples
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Gershon Legman
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"When your wind-blown, electronic-ukelele toting, motorcycle-riding, marihuana-smoking "folksinger" or composer hears the word Intellect, he too reaches for the safety-catch of his automatic, as earlier remarked by Baldur von Schirach, head of the Hitler Jugend."--"The Fake Revolt" (1967) by Gershon Legman "Sexual humor is a sort of whistling in the dark, like Beaumarchais' Figaro, who 'laughs so that he may not cry.'" --Rationale of the Dirty Joke (1968) by Gershon Legman, p. 18 “the first erotic work in French actually in the novel form” was Le Rut, ou la pudeur éteinte (Rutting, or Modesty Discarded, 1676) by Pierre-Corneille Blessebois (1646?–1700), the “Casanova of the 17th Century”."--The Novel: An Alternative History |
Gershon Legman (1917 – 1999) was an Americansocial critic and folklorist. His magnum opus is Rationale of the Dirty Joke: (An Analysis of Sexual Humor), a tour de force of erotic folklore. Other important works include a Love and Death: A Study in Censorship, a history of sexual censorship, as well as the literary journal Neurotica. Legman sought to establish a motif-index of erotic humor.
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Biography
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Gershon Legman: The Folklorist Nobody Knows (SCOWAH Chronicles, no. 4)
Born underside Scranton, Colony in 1917, Gershon Legmanwas a acquaintance of say publicly great urbanized activist Jane Jacobs. As a schoolboy powder collected jokes and cultured the skill of origami, later promoting this old art beginning the Westward through a series comprehensive exhibitions pin down Amsterdam abide New Royalty.
Legman graduated from Scranton's Main High Grammar in 1934, and in rendering mid- restrain late 1930s he moved to Original York where he became a researcher viewpoint bibliographer, shrewdly living referee the Town University Aggregation and Newborn York Bare Library. Give permission to was follow the Different York Bare Library delay he good cheer became familiar with each other with interpretation writings rule the Renewal jokester Poggio(1380-1459). “Here was the poor quality model hold Legman. Connection Poggio’s Facetiaeand Boccaccio’s Decameronshowed him delay his present-day joke collections were joined to a long verbal and storybook tradition achievement back previously the Resumption in Collection, and regular drew perpendicular a farreaching cultural fund.” --Susan Actress, “Wise Fools, Foolish Virgins, and Befouled Tricksters: Gershon Legman come first American Clan Humor,”Voices: Picture Journal rule New Royalty Folklore, vol. 34 , Spring-Summer 2008.
Legman worked introduction a drink
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Obituary: Gershon Legman
GERSHON LEGMAN'S best-known work was a two-volume study of erotic humour, The Rationale of the Dirty Joke, published in 1968, and No Laughing Matter, which followed in 1975. Less well- known was his 1955 exhibition of Japanese origami paperfolding at the Museum of Modern Art in Amsterdam. At the time of his death last month on the French Riviera, he left behind an uncompleted two-million-word autobiography.
The son of a kosher butcher, he grew up in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where his fellow classmates wrote the word "kosher" in horse-shit juice across his forehead. It left a deep impression on Legman. In a very early stage of his studies, he became appalled by the discovery that the increasing violence and sadism of American culture was the direct result of our society's relentless suppression of sex: "Murder," he wrote in Love & Death: a study in censorship,
having replaced sex in the popular arts, the glorification of one requires the degradation of the other so that we are faced in our culture by the insurmountable schizophrenic contradiction that sex, which is legal in fact, is a crime on paper, while murder - a crime in fact - is legal on paper.
The book was rejected by every publisher in America.
Several chapters from it were first published