HERE IS ADDITIONAL INFORMATION on Dick Simon's two books:

The Labyrinth of the Comic: Theory and Practice from Fielding to Freud, (Tallahassee, Florida:The University Presses of Florida, 1985) is a study of the closely related concepts of comedy, the comic, laughter, and humor in four disciplines from the mid eighteenth to the early twentieth century: in literature, philosophy, experimental psychology, and psychoanalysis. Individual chapters concern Henry Fielding's two great comic novels, Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, Thackeray's novel Vanity Fair; George Meredith's novel The Ordeal of Richard Feveral; Soren Kierkegaard's concept of the comic as it is contained within his philosophy and acted out by his life; the study of laughter within 19th century experimental psychology; and Sigmund Freud's concept of humor as it emerged within psychoanalysis.

"This book is indispensible for anyone interested in the subject of comedy. It is a searching, comprehensive, and wise discussion of modern comic theory and practice, and a marvelously enlightening inquiry into that crucially important human trait, the sense of humor." -Robert Polhemus, Stanford University

"Simon's chapter on Freud's Jokes is first-rate, both judicious and insightful. He rescues Freud from his commentators, while providing a fresh view of this, Freud's most detailed treatise on language and literature." -Norman Holland, Milbauer Professor of English, University of Florida

"Simon obviously knows his Kierkegaard, has studied the texts carefully, and interpreted them imaginatively. . . . Most important, because (to my knowledge) unique in the literature on Kierkegaard, is this: acknowledging the comedic character of Kierkegaard's works. . . he turns to Kierkegaard's life and treats it as another text, also comic and integrally intertwined with the published works. His interpretation is well documented and throws a new light on the man and his corpus." -Louis Mackey, The University of Texas at Austin

"Simon's study is immensely erudite, admirably responsible, impressively argued, written everywhere with dash and wit. . . He seems to have read everything and convinces us in short order that we can reply on him to have not only comprehended the major theoretical and imaginative texts germane to such an ambitious study but to be completely fair-minded in reference to portions of that corpus of theory and practice that are difficult to fit into a scheme without edges and overlap . . . It is a scholarly work par excellence. -Douglas Fowler, Florida State University

This is the cover of the Chinese version of TRASH CULTURE, published in 2002.

Trash Culture: Popular Culture and the Great Tradition (Berkeley and Los Angeles: The University of California Press, 1999) is a study of the ways in which great books and popular entertainments are surprisingly similar (though not identical) to each other, and an argument that we must study the popular entertainments with the same care and precision with which we study the great books.

Individual chapters compare: Star Wars to Edmund Spenser's Renaissance poem, The Faerie Queene; Seinfeld to George Etherege's Restoration comedy, The Man of Mode; Friends to Shakespeare's melodramatic comedy, Much Ado About Nothing; The Days of Our Lives to John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi and to related revenge tragedies; The National Enquirer, People Magazine, and other gossip magazines to great tragedies by Euripides, Strindberg, and Ibsen; Advertising to the tradition of literary utopias including Sir Thomas More's Utopia; Playboy to Castiglione's Book of the Courtier; Cosmopolitan to womens coming of age novels like Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, and Gustav Flaubert's Madame Bovary; the shopping mall to the great formal gardens of the past; Star Trek to Swift's Gulliver's Travels, and the great cycle of movies about Vietnam to the great cycle of novels and poems and plays about war, from Aristophanes to Shakespeare to Conrad.

GO TO THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS WEB SITE FOR TRASH CULTURE:

http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/8478.html

LISTEN TO AN INTERVIEW WITH RICHARD SIMON on WILL Urbana Illinois

See "The Afternoon Show" with Celeste Quinn, for the Interview broadcast on May 1, 2000

If the connection below does not work, go to the web site for radio Station WILL and navigate to the Afternoon Show

http://www.will.uiuc.edu/WILL_Contents/AM_Contents/AM_Aftmag_Webcasts.htm