Author: Doreen Fowler
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9781617033841
Category : Humorous stories, American
Languages : en
Pages : 266

Get Book Here

Book Description

Author: Michael Dunne
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807135364
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Get Book Here

Book Description
Though the phrase "Calvinist humor" may seem to be an oxymoron, Michael Dunne, in highly original and unfailingly interesting readings of major American fiction writers, uncovers and traces two recurrent strands of Calvinist humor descending from Puritan times far into the twentieth century. Calvinist doctrine views mankind as fallen, apt to engage in any number of imperfect behaviors. Calvinist humor, Dunne explains, consists in the perception of this imperfection. When we perceive that only others are imperfect, we participate in the form of Calvinist humor preferred by William Bradford and Nathanael West. When we perceive that others are imperfect, as we all are, we participate in the form preferred by Mark Twain and William Faulkner, for example. Either by noting their characters' inferiority or by observing ways in which we are all far from perfect, Dunne observes, American writers have found much to laugh about and many occasions for Calvinist humor. The two strains of Calvinist humor are alike in making the faults of others more important than their virtues. They differ in terms of what we might think of as the writer/perceiver's disposition: his or her willingness to recognize the same faults in him- or herself. In addition to Bradford, West, Twain and Faulkner, Dunne discovers Calvinist humor in the works of Flannery O'Connor, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ernest Hemingway, and many others. For these authors, the world -- and thus their fiction -- is populated with flawed creatures. Even after belief in orthodox Calvinism diminished in the twentieth century, Dunne discovers, American writers continued to mine these veins, irrespective of the authors' religious affiliations -- or lack of them. Dunne notes that even when these writers fail to accept the Calvinist view wholeheartedly, they still have a tendency to see some version of Calvinism as more attractive than an optimistic, idealistic view of life. With an eye for the telling detail and a wry humor of his own, Dunne clearly demonstrates that the fundamental Calvinist assumption -- that human beings are fallen from some putatively better state -- has had a surprising, lingering presence in American literature.

Author: Faulkner Fox
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0307420582
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Get Book Here

Book Description
When Salon.com published Faulkner Fox’s article on motherhood, “What I Learned from Losing My Mind,” the response was so overwhelming that Salon reran the piece twice. The experience made Faulkner realize that she was not alone—that the country is full of women who are anxious and conflicted about their roles as mothers and wives. In Dispatches from a Not-So-Perfect Life, her provocative, brutally honest, and often hilarious memoir of motherhood, Faulkner explores the causes of her unhappiness, as well as the societal and cultural forces that American mothers have to contend with. From the time of her first pregnancy, Faulkner found herself—and her body—scrutinized by doctors, friends, strangers, and, perhaps most of all, herself. In addition to the significant social pressures of raising the perfect child and being the perfect mom, Faulkner also found herself increasingly incensed by the unequal distribution of household labor and infuriated by the gender inequity in both her home and others’. And though she loves her children and her husband passionately, is thankful for her bountiful middle-class life, and feels wracked with guilt for being unhappy, she just can’t seem to experience the sense of satisfaction that she thought would come with the package. She’s finally got it all—the husband, the house, the kids, an interesting part-time job, even a few hours a week to write—so why does she feel so conflicted? Faulkner sheds light on the fear, confusion, and isolation experienced by many new mothers, mapping the terrain of contemporary domesticity, marriage, and motherhood in a voice that is candid, irreverent, and deeply personal, while always chronicling the unparalleled joy she and other mothers take in their children.

Author: Edward Piacentino
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807130865
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 344

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Old Southwest flourished between 1830 and 1860, but its brand of humor lives on in the writings of Mark Twain, the novels of William Faulkner, the television series The Beverly Hillbillies, the material of comedian Jeff Foxworthy, and even cyberspace, where nonsoutherners can come up to speed on subjects like hickphonics. The first book on its subject, The Enduring Legacy of Old Southwest Humor engages topics ranging from folklore to feminism to the Internet as it pays tribute to a distinctly American comic style that has continued to reinvent itself. The book begins by examining frontier southern humor as manifested in works of Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Woody Guthrie, Harry Crews, William Price Fox, Fred Chappell, Barry Hannah, Cormac McCarthy, and African American writers Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker, Ishmael Reed, and Yusef Komunyakaa. It then explores southwestern humor’s legacy in popular culture—including comic strips, comedians, and sitcoms—and on the Internet. Many of the trademark themes of modern and contemporary southern wit appeared in stories that circulated in the antebellum Southwest. Often taking the form of tall tales, those stories have served and continue to serve as rich, reusable material for southern writers and entertainers in the twentieth century and beyond. The Enduring Legacy of Old Southwest Humor is an innovative collaboration that delves into jokes about hunting, drinking, boasting, and gambling as it studies, among other things, the styles of comedians Andy Griffith, Dave Gardner, and Justin Wilson. It gives splendid demonstration that through the centuries southern humor has continued to be a powerful tool for disarming hypocrites and opening up sensitive issues for discussion.

Author: Brom Weber
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 616

Get Book Here

Book Description

Author: Hennig Cohen
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820316055
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 540

Get Book Here

Book Description
One of the most entertaining genres of American literature is the bold, masculine, wildly exaggerated, and highly imaginative frontier humor of the Old Southwest, produced between 1835 and 1861 in an area that extended from Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia westward to Lousiana, Arkansas, Missouri, and Texas. Hennig Cohen and William B. Dillingham have tapped the wealth of this region to produce a collection that over the last three decades has become the standard anthology of Old Southwestern humor. This new, extensively revised edition includes an expanded introduction, a dozen replacement sections, an updated bibliography, and works by three new writers--Phillip B. January, Matthew C. Field, and John Gorman Barr. Most generously represented are George Washington Harris, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Johnson Jones Hooper, and Thomas Bangs Thorpe. Selections from twenty-five authors are featured along with brief biographical essays that combine historical and political analysis with perceptive literary criticism. These selections document important facets of antebellum American culture and provide the background of the literary achievement of Mark Twain and William Faulkner.

Author: Joseph R. Urgo
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9781578066797
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 236

Get Book Here

Book Description
A study of Faulkner's place among his peers

Author: Doreen Fowler
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1628468599
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Get Book Here

Book Description
In 1944, William Faulkner wrote to Malcolm Cowley, “I'm telling the same story over and over which is myself and the world. That's all a writer ever does, he tells his own biography in a thousand different terms.” With these words, Faulkner suggests that what changes in the course of his prolific novel-writing career is not so much the content but the style, “the thousand different terms” of his fiction. The essays in Faulkner and the Craft of Fiction, first presented at the 1987 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference at the University of Mississippi, focus on Faulkner's narrative inventiveness, on how Faulkner, like his character Benjy in The Sound and the Fury, relentlessly kept “trying to say.” The contributors, authorities on Faulkner's narrative, offer a wide variety of critical approaches to Faulkner's fiction-writing process. Cleanth Brooks, for example, applies the strategies of New Criticism to Faulkner's rendering of the heroic and pastoral modes; Judith L. Sensibar attempts to locate biographical sources for repeated Faulknerian paradigms; and Philip M. Weinstein draws on the theories of the Marxist Althusser and the French psychoanalyst Lacan. The topics examined are similarly wide-ranging.

Author: Jay Watson
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496818121
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 247

Get Book Here

Book Description
Contributions by Eric Gary Anderson, Melanie R. Anderson, Jodi A. Byrd, Gina Caison, Robbie Ethridge, Patricia Galloway, LeAnne Howe, John Wharton Lowe, Katherine M. B. Osburn, Melanie Benson Taylor, Annette Trefzer, and Jay Watson From new insights into the Chickasaw sources and far-reaching implications of Faulkner’s fictional place-name “Yoknapatawpha,” to discussions that reveal the potential for indigenous land-, family-, and story-based methodologies to deepen understanding of Faulkner’s fiction (including but not limited to the novels and stories he devoted explicitly to Native American topics), the eleven essays of this volume advance the critical analysis of Faulkner’s Native South and the Native South’s Faulkner. Critics push beyond assessments of the historical accuracy of his Native representations and the colonial hybridity of his Indian characters. Essayists turn instead to indigenous intellectual culture for new models, problems, and questions to bring to Faulkner studies. Along the way, readers are treated to illuminating comparisons between Faulkner’s writings and the work of a number of Native American authors, filmmakers, tribal leaders, and historical figures. Faulkner and the Native South brings together Native and non-Native scholars in a stimulating and often surprising critical dialogue about the indigenous wellsprings of Faulkner’s creative energies and about Faulkner’s own complicated presence in Native American literary history.

Author: Mike Sacks
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101613270
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 475

Get Book Here

Book Description
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY NPR Amy Poehler, Mel Brooks, Adam McKay, George Saunders, Bill Hader, Patton Oswalt, and many more take us deep inside the mysterious world of comedy in this fascinating, laugh-out-loud-funny book. Packed with behind-the-scenes stories—from a day in the writers’ room at The Onion to why a sketch does or doesn’t make it onto Saturday Night Live to how the BBC nearly erased the entire first season of Monty Python’s Flying Circus—Poking a Dead Frog is a must-read for comedy buffs, writers and pop culture junkies alike.