The stability of laughter, on the comic aesthetic in modernist literature
Item
-
Title
-
The stability of laughter, on the comic aesthetic in modernist literature
-
Identifier
-
d_2009_2013:a41a9462dd4e:10645
-
identifier
-
10901
-
Creator
-
Nikopoulos, James,
-
Contributor
-
John Brenkman
-
Date
-
2010
-
Language
-
English
-
Publisher
-
City University of New York.
-
Subject
-
Comparative literature
-
Abstract
-
This dissertation looks at European Modernism in light of one of its more neglected priorities: its rethinking of the nature of comedy and humor. The use of comic elements in the work of Luigi Pirandello, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Italo Svevo, and Samuel Beckett betrays a radical rethinking of the meaning of laughter and humor. As such, the theoretical predecessor to the Modernist use of the comic is Baudelaire, whose essay, "Sur l'essence du rire," details a complete upending of traditional ideas of laughter. No longer merely the representative phenomenon of "happiness" and "joy," laughter becomes the signpost par excellence of modern notions of ambiguity and instability which implicates the laugher as much as the laughed-at. Since Baudelaire's essay also reads laughter as a marker of character, it anticipates the Modernist use of one's sense of humor as a way of dramatizing one's subjectivity. What makes one laugh at nine years old is not always what makes him laugh at twenty-nine, the same way a Chinese man may not find the same thing funny as a man from Argentina. When a character laughs at something, an unconscious mode of communication is on display, one that dramatizes that character's specific subjectivity at the moment of the laughter. This is what Joyce works off of when he contrasts Bloom's playful sense of humor with the more violent mockery of his fellow Dubliners in Ulysses. This is about forging an emotional link or a profound disconnect between the psyches of individuals that is recognized in purely dramatic fashion. The exclusivity of the relationship between laugher and laugher, or between laugher and laughed-at, coupled with the comic's appeal to the universality of human laughter---we are the only species that laughs according to Aristotle and Darwin, which means as a species we all laugh---is what makes of the comic into a remarkably ambiguous aesthetic that operates in that no-man's land between the danger of life's myriad ironies and the safety of traditional comic values of community and happy endings. This dissertation deals with this in-between zone.
-
Type
-
dissertation
-
Source
-
2009_2013.csv
-
degree
-
Ph.D.
-
Program
-
Comparative Literature
