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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
In the Event of Laughter: Psychoanalysis, Literature and Comedy

In the Event of Laughter: Psychoanalysis, Literature and Comedy

Bown, Alfie

Hardcover

Series: Psychoanalytic Horizons

PhilosophyLiterary CriticismGeneral Psychology

ISBN10: 1501342622
ISBN13: 9781501342622
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Published: Nov 15 2018
Pages: 168
Weight: 0.80
Height: 0.80 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.70
Language: English

Using Lacanian psychoanalysis, as well as its pre-history and afterlives, In the Event of Laughter argues for a new framework for discussing laughter. Responding to a tradition of 'comedy studies' that has been interested only in the causes of laughter (in why we laugh), it proposes a different relationship between laughter and causality. Ultimately it argues that laughter is both cause and effect, troubling chronological time and asking for a more nuanced way of conceiving the relationship between subjects and their laughter than existing theories have accounted for.

Making this visible via psychoanalytic ideas of retroactivity, Alfie Bown explores how laughter - far from being a mere response to a stimulus - changes the relationship between the present, the past and the future. Bown investigates this hypothesis in relation to a range of comic texts from the 'history of laughter, ' discussing Chaucer, Shakespeare, Kafka and Chaplin, as well as lesser-known but vital figures from the comic genre.

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