From a "comic strip" papyrus dating from Egypt's New Kingdom to the works of Stein, Joyce, and Barth, "nonsense" texts reveal a set of possibilities as rich and complex as the more conventional system of "making sense" from which they are derived. Examining palindromes, children's rhymes, puns, anagrams, code languages, and other texts, Susan Stewart explores the labyrinthine relationships between common sense and nonsense--and presents an original...