The Odd One In

The Odd One In PDF Author: Alenka Zupancic
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262740311
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
A Lacanian look at how comedy might come to philosophy's rescue, with examples ranging from Hegel and Molière to George W. Bush and Borat. Why philosophize about comedy? What is the use of investigating the comical from philosophical and psychoanalytic perspectives? In The Odd One In, Alenka Zupančič considers how philosophy and psychoanalysis can help us understand the movement and the logic involved in the practice of comedy, and how comedy can help philosophy and psychoanalysis recognize some of the crucial mechanisms and vicissitudes of what is called humanity. Comedy by its nature is difficult to pin down with concepts and definitions, but as artistic form and social practice comedy is a mode of tarrying with a foreign object—of including the exception. Philosophy's relationship to comedy, Zupančič writes, is not exactly a simple story (and indeed includes some elements of comedy). It could begin with the lost book of Aristotle's Poetics, which discussed comedy and laughter (and was made famous by Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose). But Zupančič draws on a whole range of philosophers and exemplars of comedy, from Aristophanes, Molière, Hegel, Freud, and Lacan to George W. Bush and Borat. She distinguishes incisively between comedy and ideologically imposed, “naturalized” cheerfulness. Real, subversive comedy thrives on the short circuits that establish an immediate connection between heterogeneous orders. Zupančič examines the mechanisms and processes by which comedy lets the odd one in.

The Odd One In

The Odd One In PDF Author: Alenka Zupancic
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262740311
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Get Book Here

Book Description
A Lacanian look at how comedy might come to philosophy's rescue, with examples ranging from Hegel and Molière to George W. Bush and Borat. Why philosophize about comedy? What is the use of investigating the comical from philosophical and psychoanalytic perspectives? In The Odd One In, Alenka Zupančič considers how philosophy and psychoanalysis can help us understand the movement and the logic involved in the practice of comedy, and how comedy can help philosophy and psychoanalysis recognize some of the crucial mechanisms and vicissitudes of what is called humanity. Comedy by its nature is difficult to pin down with concepts and definitions, but as artistic form and social practice comedy is a mode of tarrying with a foreign object—of including the exception. Philosophy's relationship to comedy, Zupančič writes, is not exactly a simple story (and indeed includes some elements of comedy). It could begin with the lost book of Aristotle's Poetics, which discussed comedy and laughter (and was made famous by Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose). But Zupančič draws on a whole range of philosophers and exemplars of comedy, from Aristophanes, Molière, Hegel, Freud, and Lacan to George W. Bush and Borat. She distinguishes incisively between comedy and ideologically imposed, “naturalized” cheerfulness. Real, subversive comedy thrives on the short circuits that establish an immediate connection between heterogeneous orders. Zupančič examines the mechanisms and processes by which comedy lets the odd one in.

The Reception of Northrop Frye

The Reception of Northrop Frye PDF Author:
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487537751
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 735

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Book Description
The widespread opinion is that Northrop Frye’s influence reached its zenith in the 1960s and 1970s, after which point he became obsolete, his work buried in obscurity. This almost universal opinion is summed up in Terry Eagleton’s 1983 rhetorical question, "Who now reads Frye?" In The Reception of Northrop Frye, Robert D. Denham catalogues what has been written about Frye – books, articles, translations, dissertations and theses, and reviews – in order to demonstrate that the attention Frye’s work has received from the beginning has progressed at a geomantic rate. Denham also explores what we can discover once we have a fairly complete record of Frye’s reception in front of us – such as Hayden White’s theory of emplotments applied to historical writing and Byron Almén’s theory of musical narrative. The sheer quantity of what has been written about Frye reveals that the only valid response to Eagleton’s rhetorical question is "a very large and growing number," the growth being not incremental but exponential.

Contemporary Authors

Contemporary Authors PDF Author: Amy Elisabeth Fuller
Publisher: Contemporary Authors
ISBN: 9780787678876
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 456

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Book Description
A biographical and bibliographical guide to current writers in all fields including poetry, fiction and nonfiction, journalism, drama, television and movies. Information is provided by the authors themselves or drawn from published interviews, feature stories, book reviews and other materials provided by the authors/publishers.

The Comedy of Errors

The Comedy of Errors PDF Author: William Shakespeare
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : English drama
Languages : en
Pages : 94

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Book Description


The Joke Is on Us

The Joke Is on Us PDF Author: Julie A. Webber
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498569854
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
This edited volume brings together scholars of comedy to assess how political comedy encounters neoliberal themes in contemporary media. Central to this task is the notion of genre; under neoliberal conditions (where market logics motivate most actions) genre becomes “mixed.” Once stable, discreet categories such as comedy, horror, drama and news and entertainment have become blurred so as to be indistinguishable. The classic modern paradigm of comedy/tragedy no longer holds, if it ever did. Moreover, as politics becomes more economic and less moral or normative under neoliberalism, we are able to see new resistance to comedic genres that support neoliberal strategies to hide racial and gender injustice such as unlaughter, ambiguity, and anti-comedy. There is also an increasing interest with comedy as a form of entertainment on the political right following both Brexit in the UK and the election of Trump in the U.S. Several essays confront this conservative comedy and place it in context of the larger humor history of these debates over free speech and political correctness. For comedians too, entry into popular media now follows the familiar neoliberal script of the celebration of self-help with the increasing admonishment of those who fail to win in market terms. Laughter plays an important role in shaming and valorizing (often at the same time!) the precarious subject in the aftermath of global recession. Doubling down on austerity, self-help policies and equivocation in the face of extremist challenges (right and left), politics foils the critical comedian’s attempt to satirize and parody its object. Characterized by ambiguity, mixed genre and the increasing use of anti-humor, political comedy mirrors the social and political world it mocks, parodies and celebrates often with lackluster results suggesting that the joke might be on us, as audiences.

Reading Greek Tragedy

Reading Greek Tragedy PDF Author: Simon Goldhill
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009183044
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 381

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Book Description
This book is an advanced critical introduction to Greek tragedy. It is written specifically for the reader who does not know Greek and who may be unfamiliar with the context of the Athenian drama festival but who nevertheless wants to appreciate the plays in all their complexity. Simon Goldhill aims to combine the best contemporary scholarly criticism in classics with a wide knowledge of modern literary studies in other fields. He discusses the masterpieces of Athenian drama in the light of contemporary critical controversies in such a way as to enable the student or scholar not only to understand and appreciate the texts of the most commonly read plays, but also to evaluate and utilize the range of approaches to the problems of ancient drama. This revised edition contains a substantial new Introduction which engages with critical and scholarly developments in Greek tragedy since the original publication.

A Natural Perspective

A Natural Perspective PDF Author: Northrop Frye
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231082716
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book Description
Describes the geography, plants and animals, history, economy, language, religions, culture, and people of the People's Republic of China, home of one of the world's oldest continuous civilizations.

Jane Austen and Comedy

Jane Austen and Comedy PDF Author: Erin Goss
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1684480795
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
Jane Austen and Comedy takes for granted two related notions. First, Jane Austen’s books are funny; they induce laughter, and that laughter is worth attending to for a variety of reasons. Second, Jane Austen’s books are comedies, understandable both through the generic form that ends in marriage after the potential hilarity of romantic adversity and through a more general promise of wish fulfillment. In bringing together Austen and comedy, which are both often dismissed as superfluous or irrelevant to a contemporary world, this collection of essays directs attention to the ways we laugh, the ways that Austen may make us do so, and the ways that our laughter is conditioned by the form in which Austen writes: comedy. Jane Austen and Comedy invites reflection not only on her inclusion of laughter and humor, the comic, jokes, wit, and all the other topics that can so readily be grouped under the broad umbrella that is comedy, but also on the idea or form of comedy itself, and on the way that this form may govern our thinking about many things outside the realm of Austen’s work. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

The Idea of Comedy

The Idea of Comedy PDF Author: Jan Hokenson
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
ISBN: 9780838640968
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
"Disengaging unstated premises to show how the theoretical discourse about comedy often enacts the intellectual disputes of its time, The idea of comedy tracks the history of comic theories along two principal axes. The first is historical, showing how the Hellenistic ethical conception devolves into social superiority and then into populist assertions, enidng on the question of whether contemporary comic theory is still populist today." "The second axis is conceptual, sorting theories by types of agreement and dispute. Whether comedy improves the citizens or threatens political instability, whether it insults or enacts moral standards, whether it serves God and the integrated superego or the devil and the anarchic id, are some of the questions addressed by theroists such as Cicero, Maggi, Dryden, Kant, Schopenhauer, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Freud, Lacan, and Genette." -book jacket.

Comedy and Critical Thought

Comedy and Critical Thought PDF Author: Iain MacKenzie
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1786604086
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
Throughout history, comedians and clowns have enjoyed a certain freedom to speak frankly often denied to others in hegemonic systems. More recently, professional comedians have developed platforms of comic license from which to critique the traditional political establishment and have managed to play an important role in interrogating and mediating the processes of politics in contemporary society. This collection will examine the questions that arise when of comedy and critique intersect by bringing together both critical theorists and comedy scholars with a view to exploring the nature of comedy, its potential role in critical theory and the forms it can take as a practice of resistance.