Markup View

Author: OmarKarindu

Aug 5th 2011 at 3:15:44 PM

* F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel Tender is the Night gives us the remarkable monograph title ''An Attempt at a Uniform and Pragmatic Classification of the Neuroses and Psychoses, Based on an Examination of Fifteen Hundred Pre-Krapaelin and Post-Krapaelin Cases as they would be Diagnosed in the Terminology of the Different Contemporary Schools Together with a Chronology of Such Subdivisions of Opinion as Have Arisen Independently''.
* One could argue that all of Kinbote's notes in ''PaleFire'' qualify, since they narrate his own lunatic fantasies in exhaustive detail. The central poem these notes are meant to explicate is supposed to be a major work by another poet, making Kinbote's work especially useless to anyone but himself. 
* Some of the fictional books mentioned by JorgeLuisBorges count; a special example is in his story ''Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," where the title character (a 20th-century Frenchman) rewrites Cervantes' novel word-for-word in the original Spanish. He receives critical acclaim from the narrator despite the readily apparent superfluity of the project.
* In many of Flann O'Brien's works, references are made to the loopy philosophies of a character named De Selby. The AntiHero protagonist of ''The Third Policeman'' is himself writing an even less-essential monograph about De Selby.
* Irish authors like this one: the 18th-century writer Jonathan Swift gave us the Laputans of ''GulliversTravels'', a bunch of literal CloudCuckooLander types who produce nothing but this sort of research; and also ''A Tale of a Tub'', a satire of a contemporary trend for controversial philosophical and religious debates, often turning on obscure concepts and rhetorical devices, that itself contains dozens of untitled examples of this trope in the form of various "digressions."
* Thomas Pynchon and Douglas Adams both frequently drop such titles in their works.
* In ''TristramShandy,'' the title character's uncle converts his entire estate into a reenactment of the 1695 Siege of Narum; Tristram later writes a book about ''his uncle's reenactments''. It runs in the family: Tristram's father earlier writes a self-described "dissertation" about his son's first name. The author, Laurence Sterne, was...[[RunningGag Irish!]]
* It's not a book, but this seems to apply to the tedious article on foot-and-mouth disease that Mr. Deasy wants to send to the newspapers in James Joyce's ''{{Ulysses}}''. Which is of course set in [[OverusedRunningGag Dublin]].