Gershon Legman

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Gershon Legman (born November 2, 1917 in Scranton , Pennsylvania , † February 23, 1999 in Opio , Canton Le Bar-sur-Loup , France ) was an American folklorist , bibliographer and cultural critic .

Live and act

Gershon Legman was born to Emil and Julia Friedman Legman. Both were of Eastern or Central European Jewish origin; his father was a shochet . According to his obituary in The Independent (London) , his childhood classmates wrote "kosher" on his forehead with horse manure . This experience was formative for him; Because of this experience, he insisted that sadism and violence are deeply anchored in American culture because of the extreme tabooing of sex .

Legman was (except from 1964 to 1965, when he and the folklorist Alan Dundes and Vance Randolph, the famous explorer of the Ozark culture as author on site at the University of California was) a free scholar and thus belonged to any institute of. In folklore and folklore research he was a pioneer of serious engagement with taboo subjects, eroticism and pornography .

He had developed these interests as a young man, but he was also enthusiastic about origami and Mozart . Later, in the summer of 1955, he was able to convince Felix Tikotin to make the Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum available for an exhibition by the Japanese paper folding artist Akira Yoshizawa.

In 1940, at the age of 23, he wrote the first part of a treatise on oral sexual techniques, Oragenitalism , Part 1, Cunnilinctus under the stage name Roger-Maxe de la Glannege, an anagram by Gershon Legman . Almost all copies were confiscated and destroyed by the police .

He was the Kinsey Institute bibliographer and book buyer for two years . Legman also dealt in erotic literature. In 1949 his Freudian socio-critical analysis Love and Death (in German: "Liebe und Tod") appeared, a critique of the cultural censorship of sexuality . The core thesis is that America is overly permissive in the representation of violence and therefore rigid in the representation of eroticism. Legman succeeded in mailing his treatise until the United States Postal Service saw the profanity of the contents and refused to deliver the book.

At the core of this, Love and Death argued extremely morally. When Legman attended a conference on the psychopathology of comics in 1948 and there met Fredric Wertham , he wrote an essay on the subject of the pathological danger of comics for the magazine Neurotica (No. 3, 1948) and deepened his criticism in the book. Legman criticized the comics for bringing the permissive view of violence closer to children.

Neurotica was the project of a young St. Louis writer and antique dealer Jay Irving Landesman. The journal published articles by Kenneth Patchen , excerpts from The Mechanical Bride by Marshall McLuhan , and the essay The Psychopathology of 'Time' and 'Life' (No. 5, Autumn 1949). McLuhan took comics seriously too. As early as 1944, he had published a polemical article about Dagwood's mother's son from the popular comic strip Blondie in the January issue of the high-circulation Catholic magazine Columbia . For his part, Legman published another review of the comics in the first issue of McLuhan's Explorations magazine (December 1953). In number 7 his scandalous essay The Bawdy Song in Fact and in Print (1957, pp. 139–156) appeared. Another Neurotica author was Legman's friend John Clellon Holmes ( Tea for Two, in No. 2, 1948) - by the way, Holmes described Legman as a small warlike copy of Balzac ("a small belligerent facsimile of Balzac").

Legman wrote many essays, reviews and book comments, some of which were collected in The Horn Book (1964). His texts served as an introduction to the famous My Secret Life diary of the Victorian Don Juan "Walter." In the same year (1966) he published a reprint of the collection of obscene Russian stories by the folklorist Alexander Afanassjew . In 1976 he published bold texts by Mark Twain , including the story The Mammoth Cod (1902?), Which is attributed to him .

In 1953, Legman left the United States and moved to France at trial for violating United States Postal Service regulations by spreading Love and Death . Thanks to a small inheritance, he was able to acquire some land with a dilapidated Templar building in Valbonne , in the Maritime Alps in France , where he had the necessary freedom to work.

Legman edited two large volumes of Limerick from oral and written sources (1953, 1977). The first volume in this series was published in France in 1953 (in the USA in 1970): The Limerick contained over 1700 Limericks. The follow-up volume was called The New Limerick (1977). Legman's major work, the two volumes on the obscene joke , Rationale of the Dirty Joke and No Laughing Matter also received good reviews. Shortly before his death, he published two volumes of previously unpublishable songs and stories from the estate of Vance Randolph , Roll Me in Your Arms and Blow the Candle Out. (1992).

In 1999 Gershon Legman died in his self-chosen exile in France.

Works (selection)

As an author

Essays
  • The Language of Homosexuality. An American Glossary . In: George W. Henry: Sex Variants. A study of homosexual patterns . Paul B. Hoeber Publ., New York 1941, 2 Vols., Pp. 1149-79.
  • The Psychopathology of Comics . In: John C. Holmes (Ed.): Neurotica. 1948-1951 . Landesman Books, London 1981, ISBN 0-905150-26-0 (reprint of the New York 1948 edition).
  • Institutionalized Lynch. The Anatomy of a Murder Mystery . In: John C. Holmes (Ed.): Neurotica . Landesman Books, London 1981, ISBN 0-905150-26-0 .
  • By popular demand . In: John C. Holmes (Ed.): Neurotica . Landesman Books, London 1981, ISBN 0-905150-26-0
  • Epizootics . In: John C. Holmes (Ed.): Neurotica . Landesman Books, London 1981, ISBN 0-905150-26-0
  • The Castration Complex . In: John C. Holmes (Ed.): Neurotica . Landesman Books, London 1981, ISBN 0-905150-26-0 (together with Alvin Lustig)
  • Bawdy Monologues and Rhymed Recitations . In: Southern Folklore Quarterly , 40 : 59-122 (1976), ISSN  0038-4127 .
  • Erotic folk songs and ballads. An International Bibliography . In: Journal of American Folklore , Vol. 103, October-December 1990, pp. 417-501, ISSN  0021-8715 .
Books
  • Oragenitalism. An Encyclopaedic Outline of Oral Technique in Genital Excitation, Part 1, Cunnilinctus. JR Brussel, New York 1940. 63 pp. (Edition confiscated and destroyed)
  • Love and Death. A Study in Censorship . Breaking Point Publ., New York 1949.
  • On the cause of homosexuality. Two Essays, the Second in Reply to the First . Breaking Point Publ., New York 1950 (together with GV Hamilton)
  • Bibliography of Paper-folding . Priory Press, Malvern 1952. 8 pp. (No reprint!)
  • The Horn Book. Studies in Erotic Folklore and Bibliography . Cape Books, London 1970 (reprinted from New Hyde Park, NY 1964).
  • The Guilt of the Templars . Basic Books, New York 1966 (with Henry Charles Lea ).
  • The Fake Revolt . Breaking Point Publ., New York 1967.
  • An Analysis of Sexual Humor . Grove, New York 1968.
  1. Rationale of the Dirty Joke . 1968
  2. No laughing matter . 1975.
  • Kissing practices. Oralgenital Practices ("Oragenitalism. Oral Techniques in genital Excitation"). 6th edition Stephenson , Flensburg 1975 (former title Intime Kisses. Oralgenitale Praxis ).
  • Les Chansons de salle de garde . R. Deforges, Paris 1972. 440 pp.

As editor

  • The Limerick. 1700 Examples with Notes, Variants and Index . Wings Books, New York 1991, ISBN 0-517-06505-3 (reprint of New York 1970 edition)
  • Walter ( pseudonym ): My Secret Life . New edition Grove, New York 1982 (2 vol.)
  • Mark Twain : The Mammoth Cod, and, Adress to the Stomach Club . Maledicta Press Publ., Milwaukee, WI 1976, ISBN 0-916500-01-2 .
  • The New Limerick. 2750 Unpublished Examples, American and British . Crown, New York 1979, ISBN 0-517-53091-0 .
  • The Art of Mahlon Blaine. A reminiscence . Peregrine Press, East Lansing, Mich. 1982. 82 pp. (Together with Robert Arrington (Introduction) and Roland Trenary (Bibliographia)).
  • Vance Randolph: Unprintable Ozark Folksongs and Folklore . University of Arkansas Press, Fayatteville, NC
  1. Roll Me in Your Arms. Folksongs and Music . 1992, ISBN 1-55728-231-5 .
  2. Blow the candle out. Folk Rhymes and Other Lore . 1992, ISBN 1-55728-237-4 .

As an employee (introduction, etc.)

literature

  • Reinhold Aman (Ed.): In honorem G. Legman . In: Ders .: Maledicta , Vol. 1 (1977), No. 2, Maledicta Press, Waukesha, WI, pp. 109-328.
  • Mikita Brottman: Funny peculiar. Gershon LEgman and the psychopathology of humor . Analytic Press, Hillsdale, NJ 2004, ISBN 0-88163-404-2 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Neurotica. No. 1, Spring 1948 – No. 9, winter 1951. The publisher was Jay Landesman, Neurotica Publishing Comp., St. Louis and New York City (from 1950). Reprinted in full in one volume from Hacker Art Books, New York, 1963.
  2. ↑ The 9 issues of Explorations appeared from 1953 to 1959, the last number as a book from the University of Toronto Press, a selection volume, Explorations in Communications, 1960.
  3. ↑ No. 3, November 1948 (after attending the symposium The Psychopathology of Comic Books, 1948)
  4. ↑ No. 4 ( Enter Murders ). Spring 1949
  5. ↑ No. 6, Spring 1950, pp. 45-47. (via Romantic Comics)
  6. ↑ No. 7, winter 1951
  7. ↑ No. 9 1952
  8. ↑ Contents: GV Hamilton: Homosexuals and their mothers . Gershon Legman: Fathers and sons
  9. ↑ Special Dr. of the Journal of occasional bibliography , 1952
  10. ↑ German edition: The indecent joke. Theory and practice . Hoffmann & Campe, Hamburg 1970, ISBN 3-455-04100-0 (preface by Hans Giese , translation by Paul Baudisch)
  11. ↑ in the German edition. My secret life . Edition Melchior, Wolfenbüttel 2010, ISBN 978-3-941555-36-5 , Legman's introduction is not included

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Legman, Gershon
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American social critic and folklorist
DATE OF BIRTH November 2, 1917
PLACE OF BIRTH Scranton , Pennsylvania
DATE OF DEATH February 23, 1999
Place of death France