عنوان

The stability of laughter :

(Number (ISBN

0429028903

(Number (ISBN

9780429028908

Erroneous ISBN

0367138565

Erroneous ISBN

9780367138561

Title Proper

The stability of laughter :

General Material Designation

[Book]

Other Title Information

the problem of joy in modernist literature /

First Statement of Responsibility

James Nikopoulos.

Place of Publication, Distribution, etc.

London :

Name of Publisher, Distributor, etc.

Routledge,

Date of Publication, Distribution, etc.

2018.

Specific Material Designation and Extent of Item

1 online resource

Series Title

Routledge studies in twentieth-century literature ;

Volume Designation

55

Text of Note

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Text of Note

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?

Text of Note

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

Text of Note

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

0

8

8

Text of Note

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.

Title

Stability of laughter.

International Standard Book Number

9780367138561

Humor in literature.

Laughter in literature.

Modernism (Literature)

BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY-- Literary.

Humor in literature.

Laughter in literature.

LITERARY CRITICISM-- Humor.

Modernism (Literature)

BIO-- 007000

LIT-- 016000

Number

Edition

Class number

Nikopoulos, James

Date of Transaction

20200822095150.0

Cataloguing Rules (Descriptive Conventions))

pn

Electronic name

[Book]

Y