Laughter and Awkwardness in Late Medieval England


Book Description

'We live,' according to Adam Kotsko, 'in an awkward age.' While this condition may present some challenges, it may also help us to be more attuned to awkwardness in other ages. This book explores laughter and awkwardness in late-medieval English literature. In this nuanced and engaging study, David Watt focuses especially, but not exclusively, on the 15th century, which seems to intervene awkwardly in the literary trajectory between Chaucer and the Renaissance. The hypothesis of this book is that the social discomfort depicted and engendered by writers as diverse as Thomas Hoccleve, Margery Kempe, and Sir Thomas Malory is a feature rather than a flaw. In exploring this, Laughter and Awkwardness in Late Medieval England reveals how and why these texts generate awkwardness and questions and in turn contemplates what it meant to live together in an awkward age.




Laughter and Awkwardness in Late Medieval England


Book Description

'We live,' according to Adam Kotsko, 'in an awkward age.' While this condition may present some challenges, it may also help us to be more attuned to awkwardness in other ages. This book pairs medieval texts with twenty-first century films or television programmes to explore what the resonance between them can tell us about living together in an awkward age. In this nuanced and engaging study, David Watt focuses especially, but not exclusively, on the 15th century, which seems to intervene awkwardly in the literary trajectory between Chaucer and the Renaissance. This book's hypothesis is that the social discomfort depicted and engendered by writers as diverse as Thomas Hoccleve, Margery Kempe, and Sir Thomas Malory is a feature rather than a flaw. Laughter and Awkwardness in Late Medieval England explains that these authors have a great deal in common with other fifteenth-century authors, who generated embodied experiences of social discomfort in a range of genres by adopting and adapting literary techniques used by their predecessors and successors in slightly different ways. Like the twenty-first century texts with which they are paired, the late-medieval texts that feature in this book use the relationship between laughter and awkwardness to ask what it means to live with each other and how we can learn to live with ourselves.







A Confederacy of Dunces


Book Description

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize “A masterwork . . . the novel astonishes with its inventiveness . . . it is nothing less than a grand comic fugue.”—The New York Times Book Review A Confederacy of Dunces is an American comic masterpiece. John Kennedy Toole's hero, one Ignatius J. Reilly, is "huge, obese, fractious, fastidious, a latter-day Gargantua, a Don Quixote of the French Quarter. His story bursts with wholly original characters, denizens of New Orleans' lower depths, incredibly true-to-life dialogue, and the zaniest series of high and low comic adventures" (Henry Kisor, Chicago Sun-Times).




Laughter in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times


Book Description

Despite popular opinions of the ‘dark Middle Ages’ and a ‘gloomy early modern age,’ many people laughed, smiled, giggled, chuckled, entertained and ridiculed each other. This volume demonstrates how important laughter had been at times and how diverse the situations proved to be in which people laughed, and this from late antiquity to the eighteenth century. The contributions examine a wide gamut of significant cases of laughter in literary texts, historical documents, and art works where laughter determined the relationship among people. In fact, laughter emerges as a kaleidoscopic phenomenon reflecting divine joy, bitter hatred and contempt, satirical perspectives and parodic intentions. In some examples protagonists laughed out of sheer happiness and delight, in others because they felt anxiety and insecurity. It is much more difficult to detect premodern sculptures of laughing figures, but they also existed. Laughter reflected a variety of concerns, interests, and intentions, and the collective approach in this volume to laughter in the past opens many new windows to the history of mentality, social and religious conditions, gender relationships, and power structures.




The Laughing Prophet


Book Description




Extreme Cinema


Book Description

Extreme Cinema examines the highly stylized treatment of sex and violence in post-millennial transnational cinema, where the governing convention is not the narrative but the spectacle. Using profound experiments in form and composition, including jarring editing, extreme close-ups, visual disorientation and sounds that straddle the boundary between non-diegetic and diegetic registers, this mode of cinema dwells instead on the exhibition of intense violence and an acute intimacy with the sexual body. Interrogating works such as Wetlands and A Serbian Film, as well as the sub-culture of YouTube 'reaction videos', Aaron Michael Kerner and Jonathan L. Knapp demonstrate the way content and form combine in extreme cinema to affectively manipulate the viewing body.




Medieval Communities and the Mad


Book Description

The concept of madness as a challenge to communities lies at the core of legal sources. Medieval Communities and the Mad: Narratives of Crime and Mental Illness in Late Medieval France considers how communal networks, ranging from the locale to the realm, responded to people who were considered mad. The madness of individuals played a role in engaging communities with legal mechanisms and proto-national identity constructs, as petitioners sought the king's mercy as an alternative to local justice. The resulting narratives about the mentally ill in late medieval France constructed madness as an inability to live according to communal rules. Although such texts defined madness through acts that threatened social bonds, those ties were reaffirmed through the medium of the remission letter. The composers of the letters presented madness as a communal concern, situating the mad within the household, where care could be provided. Those considered mad were usually not expelled but integrated, often through pilgrimage, surveillance, or chains, into their kin and communal relationships.




Small Fry


Book Description

The New York Times–bestselling memoir by Steve Jobs’ daughter: “This sincere and disquieting portrait reveals a complex father-daughter relationship.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review Born on a farm and named in a field by her parents—artist Chrisann Brennan and Steve Jobs—Lisa Brennan-Jobs’s childhood unfolded in a rapidly changing Silicon Valley. When she was young, Lisa’s father was a mythical figure who was rarely present in her life. As she grew older, her father took an interest in her, ushering her into a new world of mansions, vacations, and private schools. Lisa found her father’s attention thrilling, but he could also be cold, critical and unpredictable. When her relationship with her mother grew strained in high school, Lisa decided to move in with her father, hoping he’d become the parent she’d always wanted him to be. Small Fry is Lisa Brennan-Jobs’s poignant story of childhood and growing up. Scrappy, wise, and funny, Lisa offers an intimate window into the peculiar world of this family, and the strange magic of Silicon Valley in the seventies and eighties.




The Mirror of Laughter


Book Description

The Mirror of Laughter presents a theory of humor and laughter by examining their relationship to human behaviors. Kozintsev is especially interested in the relationship between biological and cultural factors that influence behaviors. He divides his work into four chapters, the first of which establishes a theme of the book, focusing on the study of meaning from the perspective of philosophy and psychology, while examining linguistic theories of humor. The second chapter examines biological data regarding laughter and the evolutionary origins of laughter and humor. It demonstrates the author's interest in studying humor objectively by detailing physiological reactions and underlying psychological issues. The third section on play, including linguistic play, distinguishes between orderly and disorderly play. While orderly play has no biological roots and is synonymous with culture, disorderly play is rooted in the pre-human past. The final chapter discusses the conflict between culture and nature and how culture has transformed the original semantics of laughter. Kozintsev seeks to understand the relationship between the biological, cultural, and social origins of humor and, from here, he seeks to create new understanding that only the alliance of several disciplines could provide. All of this is done while the author challenges many popular ideas of humor, such as that humor is inherently related to hostility. Originally written in Russian, this work makes great strides towards its goal, and it does so in an interesting and enlightening way.