Machine-age Comedy

Machine-age Comedy PDF Author: Michael North
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019538122X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
In this latest addition to Oxford's Modernist Literature & Culture series, renowned modernist scholar Michael North poses fundamental questions about the relationship between modernity and comic form in film, animation, the visual arts, and literature. Machine-Age Comedy vividly constructs a cultural history that spans the entire twentieth century, showing how changes wrought by industrialization have forever altered the comic mode. With keen analyses, North examines the work of a wide range of artists--including Charlie Chaplin, Walt Disney, Marcel Duchamp, Samuel Beckett, and David Foster Wallace--to show the creative and unconventional ways the routinization of industrial society has been explored in a broad array of cultural forms. Throughout, North argues that modern writers and artists found something inherently comic in new experiences of repetition associated with, enforced by, and made inevitable by the machine age. Ultimately, this rich, tightly focused study offers a new lens for understanding the devlopment of comedic structures during periods of massive social, political, and cultural change to reveal how the original promise of modern life can be extracted from its practical disappointment.

Machine-age Comedy

Machine-age Comedy PDF Author: Michael North
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019538122X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this latest addition to Oxford's Modernist Literature & Culture series, renowned modernist scholar Michael North poses fundamental questions about the relationship between modernity and comic form in film, animation, the visual arts, and literature. Machine-Age Comedy vividly constructs a cultural history that spans the entire twentieth century, showing how changes wrought by industrialization have forever altered the comic mode. With keen analyses, North examines the work of a wide range of artists--including Charlie Chaplin, Walt Disney, Marcel Duchamp, Samuel Beckett, and David Foster Wallace--to show the creative and unconventional ways the routinization of industrial society has been explored in a broad array of cultural forms. Throughout, North argues that modern writers and artists found something inherently comic in new experiences of repetition associated with, enforced by, and made inevitable by the machine age. Ultimately, this rich, tightly focused study offers a new lens for understanding the devlopment of comedic structures during periods of massive social, political, and cultural change to reveal how the original promise of modern life can be extracted from its practical disappointment.

The Comic Turn in Contemporary English Fiction

The Comic Turn in Contemporary English Fiction PDF Author: Huw Marsh
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474293050
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
The Comic Turn in Contemporary English Fiction explores the importance of comedy in contemporary literature and culture. In an era largely defined by a mood of crisis, bleakness, cruelty, melancholia, environmental catastrophe and collapse, Huw Marsh argues that contemporary fiction is as likely to treat these subjects comically as it is to treat them gravely, and that the recognition and proper analysis of this humour opens up new ways to think about literature. Structured around readings of authors including Martin Amis, Nicola Barker, Julian Barnes, Jonathan Coe, Howard Jacobson, Magnus Mills and Zadie Smith, this book suggests not only that much of the most interesting contemporary writing is funny and that there is a comic tendency in contemporary fiction, but also that this humour, this comic licence, allows writers of contemporary fiction to do peculiar and interesting things – things that are funny in the sense of odd or strange and that may in turn inspire a funny turn in readers. Marsh offers a series of original critical and theoretical frameworks for discussing questions of literary genre, style, affect and politics, demonstrating that comedy is an often neglected mode that plays a generative role in much of the most interesting contemporary writing, creating sites of rich political, stylistic, cognitive and ethical contestation whose analysis offers a new perspective on the present.

Romantic Poets and the Laughter of Feeling

Romantic Poets and the Laughter of Feeling PDF Author: Matthew Ward
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198894775
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
The Romantic period witnessed decisive interest in how feeling might align with forms of artistic expression. Many critical studies have focused on the serious side and melancholic moods of Romantic poets. Romantic Poets and the Laughter of Feeling instead embraces the sublime and the ridiculous to offer an original and compelling new reading of British Romanticism. It reveals the decisive role laughter and the laughable play in Romantic aesthetics, emotions, and ethics. Matthew Ward shows that laughter was one of the primary means by which Romantics embraced and expanded upon, but also frequently aped and lampooned, sympathetic feeling. The laughter of feeling is both the expression of sympathy and an articulation of its implications, prejudices, and constraints. For Romantic poets like Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats, the sound of laughter carries the hope that greater knowledge of others derives from feeling for and with them through poetry, and this might lead to a better understanding of oneself. Yet laughter also makes these poets acutely aware that our emotional lives are utterly unfamiliar and perhaps ultimately unknowable. Their prosody of laughter enlivens and exposes; it embodies their sense of?and ambitions for?poetry, and yet calls those matters into the most comical and gravest doubt. Laughter helps define what it is to be human. This book shows that it also defines what it is to be a 'Romantic' poet.

Laughter, Literature, Violence, 1840–1930

Laughter, Literature, Violence, 1840–1930 PDF Author: Jonathan Taylor
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3030114139
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Laughter, Literature, Violence, 1840-1930 investigates the strange, complex, even paradoxical relationship between laughter, on the one hand, and violence, war, horror, death, on the other. It does so in relation to philosophy, politics, and key nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary texts, by Edgar Allan Poe, Edmund Gosse, Wyndham Lewis and Katherine Mansfield – texts which explore the far reaches of Schadenfreude, and so-called ‘superiority theories’ of laughter, pushing these theories to breaking point. In these literary texts, the violent superiority often ascribed to laughter is seen as radically unstable, co-existing with its opposite: an anarchic sense of equality. Laughter, humour and comedy are slippery, duplicitous, ambivalent, self-contradictory hybrids, fusing apparently discordant elements. Now and then, though, literary and philosophical texts also dream of a different kind of laughter, one which reaches beyond its alloys – a transcendent, ‘perfect’ laughter which exists only in and for itself.

Women at Work in Twenty-First-Century European Cinema

Women at Work in Twenty-First-Century European Cinema PDF Author: Barbara Mennel
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252050967
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Book Description
From hairdressers and caregivers to reproductive workers and power-suited executives, images of women's labor have powered a fascinating new movement within twenty-first-century European cinema. Social realist dramas capture precarious working conditions. Comedies exaggerate the habits of the global managerial class. Stories from countries battered by the global financial crisis emphasize the patriarchal family, debt, and unemployment. Barbara Mennel delves into the ways these films about female labor capture the tension between feminist advances and their appropriation by capitalism in a time of ongoing transformation. Looking at independent and genre films from a cross-section of European nations, Mennel sees a focus on economics and work adapted to the continent's varied kinds of capitalism and influenced by concepts in second-wave feminism. More than ever, narratives of work put female characters front and center--and female directors behind the camera. Yet her analysis shows that each film remains a complex mix of progressive and retrogressive dynamics as it addresses the changing nature of work in Europe.

Slapstick Modernism

Slapstick Modernism PDF Author: William Solomon
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252098463
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Slapstick comedy landed like a pie in the face of twentieth-century culture. Pratfalls percolated alongside literary modernism throughout the 1920s and 1930s before slapstick found explosive expression in postwar literature, experimental film, and popular music. William Solomon charts the origins and evolution of what he calls slapstick modernism--a merging of artistic experimentation with the socially disruptive lunacy made by the likes of Charlie Chaplin. Romping through texts, films, and theory, Solomon embarks on an intellectual odyssey from the high modernism of Dos Passos and Williams to the late modernism of the Beats and Burroughs before a head-on crash into the raw power of punk rock. Throughout, he shows the links between the experimental writers and silent screen performers of the early century, and explores the potent cultural undertaking that drew inspiration from anarchical comedy after World War II.

The Cambridge Companion to Wyndham Lewis

The Cambridge Companion to Wyndham Lewis PDF Author: Tyrus Miller
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316472949
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
The Cambridge Companion to Wyndham Lewis offers fresh insight into the fascinating and controversial works, both literary and visual, of Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957). Accessible to students and scholars alike, this Companion illuminates key areas of Lewis's life and career. Written by a team of leading experts, this book examines Lewis's work in light of contemporary concerns with radical politics, feminism and queer perspectives, and the effects of mass media. Individual essays further illustrate the author's early leadership of the British artistic avant-garde, his varying later phases as a writer and painter, and his radical and changing political views, in addition to his complex views on gender and race, his relation to philosophy and theology, and his idiosyncratic practice of cultural criticism.

The Bloomsbury Companion to Modernist Literature

The Bloomsbury Companion to Modernist Literature PDF Author: Ulrika Maude
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1780936559
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 561

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Book Description
In this book, leading international scholars explore the major ideas and debates that have made the study of modernist literature one of the most vibrant areas of literary studies today. The Bloomsbury Companion to Modernist Literature offers a comprehensive guide to current research in the field, covering topics including: · The modernist everyday: emotion, myth, geographies and language scepticism · Modernist literature and the arts: music, the visual arts, cinema and popular culture · Textual and archival approaches: manuscripts, genetic criticism and modernist magazines · Modernist literature and science: sexology, neurology, psychology, technology and the theory of relativity · The geopolitics of modernism: globalization, politics and economics · Resources: keywords and an annotated bibliography

Interwar Women’s Comic Fiction

Interwar Women’s Comic Fiction PDF Author: Nicola Darwood
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527545156
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 127

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Book Description
This collection of essays examines the work of five intermodernist writers. Some were established authors before the First World War and others continued to write after the Second World War, but this book focuses particularly on their writing between 1918 and 1939. Elizabeth von Arnim, Stella Benson, Bradda Field, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Stella Gibbons and Winifred Watson had much in common: they all wrote novels full of comic moments, which often challenged the cultural politics of the interwar period. Drawing on the literary and critical contexts of each novel, the essays here discuss the use of comic structures that enabled the authors to critique the dominant patriarchal structures of their time, and offer an alternative, sometimes subversive, view of the world in which their characters reside. This book contributes to the growing scholarly interest in interwar fiction, focusing principally on novelists who have fallen out of public view. It widens our understanding both of the authors and of the continuing, highly topical debate about interwar women novelists.

Second Nature

Second Nature PDF Author: Josephine Gray
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 178661510X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
This critical intervention in the study of the comic investigates how the comic act is also an expressive and performative act that precedes philosophical conceptualisation. The book puts Bergson, philosophy and the body at the centre of its investigation to explore different aspects of the field, from the history and philosophy of comedy to film and psychoanalysis. The volume develops a theoretical and practice-based framework that will be a valuable resource for students, scholars and practitioners alike in the fields of philosophy, literary studies, theatre and performance studies and comedy studies. List of Contributors: Caterina Angela Agus, Fred Dalmasso, Lisabeth During, Xavier Escribano, Giovanni Fusetti, Davide Giovanzana, Josephine Gray, María J. Ortega Máñez, Meg Mumford, Jean-Michel Rabaté, Carolyn Shapiro, Lisa Trahair