| Description |
1 online resource |
| Series |
Routledge studies in twentieth-century literature ; 55 |
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Routledge studies in twentieth-century literature ; 55.
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| Contents |
Cover; Half Title; Series Page; Title Page; Copyright Page; Contents; Acknowledgments; Introduction; A Note on Methodology; A Note on Style and Organization; PART I; 1 Laughter, In Theory and In Practice; The Stabilities of Laughter; 2 Our Miserable Modernity and Its Myriad Laughters; The Grumpiest of Times; Laughing at Modernity; Laughing with Modernity; A More Authentic Joy; 3 Stories of Comic Experience; Varieties of Painful Laughter: Malicious, Nervous, Pathological; Against Irony; The Activism of Naivety; In Praise of Play; The Meaningfulness of Meaninglessness; 4 Laughter? Joyous? |
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PART II5 Pathology, In Theory: Baudelaire-Evolving into Laughter; 6 Pathology, In Practice: Lu Xun's "Diary of a Madman" and T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"; 7 Individuality, In Theory: Nietzsche-Become Your Laughter; Joy Persists; Spontaneity Acquires Meaning; Modernity Ridens; 8 Individuality, In Practice: Ulysses' Scrupulous Gestures; Confecting Character; Confecting a Cosmos; Characterizing a Cosmos; 9 Absurdity, In Theory: Pirandello-Making Pain Funny; Enter Pirandello; Comedy Is Tragedy Minus Time |
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10 Absurdity, In Practice: A World Worthy of Its Laughter-Barnes, Beckett, Hughes, SvevoAbsurdity Is Unjust; Injustice Is Absurd; The Certainty with Which We Suffer; "Our Next Gesture Permitted Our Next Misunderstanding . . ."; Excepting the Rule; On the Seventh Day; Epilogue: Kafka's Primate; Index |
| Summary |
A "sad and corrupt" age, a period of "crisis" and "upheaval"--What T.S. Eliot famously summed up as "the panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history." Modernism has always been characterized by its self-conscious sense of suffering. Why, then, was it so obsessed with laughter? From Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Bergson and Freud to Pirandello, Beckett, Hughes, Barnes, and Joyce, no moment in cultural history has written about laughter this much. James Nikopoulos investigates modernity's paradoxical relationship with mirth. Why was the gesture we conventionally associate with happiness deemed the only sensible way of responding to a world, as Max Weber wrote, that had been "disenchanted of its gods?" In answering these questions, Nikopoulos also delves into our ongoing relationship with laughter. He looks to contemporary research in emotion and evolutionary theory, as well as to the two-thousand-plus-year history of the philosophy of humor, in order to propose a novel way of understanding laughter, humor, and their complicated relationships with modern life. The Stability of Laughter explores how art unsettles the simplifications we revert to in our attempts to make sense of human history and social interaction |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index |
| Notes |
Print version record |
| Subject |
Laughter in literature.
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Humor in literature.
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Modernism (Literature)
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BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY -- Literary.
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LITERARY CRITICISM -- Humor.
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Humor in literature
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Laughter in literature
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Modernism (Literature)
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| Form |
Electronic book
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| ISBN |
9780429028908 |
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0429028903 |
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