摘要:This paper analyses some ways of reacting to strange things - literary texts, for instance. After identifying a tendency to laugh at other people's foolishness, I will be reading texts by Robert Musil, Walter Pitkin, E.A. Poe, and H.P. Lovecraft, among others, and I will analyse the frequent charge of stupidity in its relation to the ways through which we reveal and describe ourselves as interpreters.