Humor, Empathy, and Community in Twentieth-Century American Poetry explores how American poets of the last hundred years have used laughter to create communities of readers and writers. For poets slightly outside of the literary or social mainstream, humor encourages mutual understanding and empathic insight among artist, audience, and subject. As a result, laughter helps poets reframe and reject literary, political, and discursive hierarchies--whether to overturn those hierarchies, or to place themselves at the top. While theorists like Freud and Bergson argue that laughter patrols and maintains the boundary between in-group and out-group, this volume shows how laughter helps us cross or re-draw those boundaries. Poets who practice such constructive humor promote a more democratic approach to laughter. Humor reveals their beliefs about their audiences and their attitudes toward the Romantic notion that poets are exceptional figures. When poets use humor to promote empathy, they suggest that poetry's ethical function is tied to its structure: empathy, humor, and poetry identify shared patterns among apparently disparate objects. This book explores a broad range of serious approaches to laughter: the inclusive, community-building humor of W. H. Auden and Marianne Moore; the self-aggrandizing humor of Ezra Pound; the self-critical humor of T. S. Eliot; Sterling Brown's antihierarchical comedy; Elizabeth Bishop's attempts to balance mockery with sympathy; and the comic epistemologies of Lucille Clifton, Stephanie Burt, Cathy Park Hong, and other contemporary poets. It charts a developing poetics of laughter in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, showing how humor can be deployed to embrace, to exclude, and to transform.
"The author is convincing in arguing that as a literary form comedy is as important as tragedy...Brown and Bishop use humor to evoke feelings of equality and love." - L. L. Johnson, CHOICE
"In the introduction to this volume Trousdale updates the theory of humor in poetry, providing an apt summary of humor theory from Plato to Freud. This alone makes this volume invaluable. According to Trousdale, "W. H. Auden, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Sterling Brown, Elizabeth Bishop, and a number of contemporary poets provide the basis of a new theory of humor, in which laughter leads to profound intersubjective insight". And in the seven chapters that follow the author is convincing in arguing that as a literary form comedy is as important as tragedy. She shows that the above poets use humor as a test of friendship and collaborative creation. This insightful study concludes with a summary of laughter and understanding in the work of contemporary poets Raymond McDaniel, Stephanie Burt, Cathy Park Hong, Albert Goldbarth, Kim Rosenfield, and Lucille Clifton." - L. L. Johnson, emeritus, Lewis & Clark College, CHOICE
"Piecing together insights from the chapters, however, the reader does attain a sense of the complexity of the comic, its importance in twentieth-century poetry, and the way that the joy that we take in reading these canonical poets is often informed by their lightness—making poetry something other than a purely academic affair." - Jess Cotton, University of Cambridge, UK, The Review of English Studies
"There is a rich vein to be mined here." - Robert Zamsky, New College of Florida, ALH Online Review
"Every page was both fun and compelling: this book is an exciting study of recent American poets who are drawn to humor more than-and in more ways than-we have recognized. As Rachel Trousdale shows, these poets do not just write very funny poems: they are interested in the ethical and intersubjective possibilities of humor, especially in how laughter can help people empathize or fail to empathize." - HUMOR
"For Trousdale, each poet is not merely interested in humor as a device but is also a theorist of humor whose understanding of it links to much broader concerns that course through their poetry and poetics." - Robert Zamsky, American Literary History
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"The author is convincing in arguing that as a literary form comedy is as important as tragedy...Brown and Bishop use humor to evoke feelings of equality and love." - L. L. Johnson, CHOICE
"In the introduction to this volume Trousdale updates the theory of humor in poetry, providing an apt summary of humor theory from Plato to Freud. This alone makes this volume invaluable. According to Trousdale, "W. H. Auden, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Sterling Brown, Elizabeth Bishop, and a number of contemporary poets provide the basis of a new theory of humor, in which laughter leads to profound intersubjective insight". And in the seven chapters that follow the author is convincing in arguing that as a literary form comedy is as important as tragedy. She shows that the above poets use humor as a test of friendship and collaborative creation. This insightful study concludes with a summary of laughter and understanding in the work of contemporary poets Raymond McDaniel, Stephanie Burt, Cathy Park Hong, Albert Goldbarth, Kim Rosenfield, and Lucille Clifton." - L. L. Johnson, emeritus, Lewis & Clark College, CHOICE
"Piecing together insights from the chapters, however, the reader does attain a sense of the complexity of the comic, its importance in twentieth-century poetry, and the way that the joy that we take in reading these canonical poets is often informed by their lightness—making poetry something other than a purely academic affair." - Jess Cotton, University of Cambridge, UK, The Review of English Studies
"There is a rich vein to be mined here." - Robert Zamsky, New College of Florida, ALH Online Review
"Every page was both fun and compelling: this book is an exciting study of recent American poets who are drawn to humor more than-and in more ways than-we have recognized. As Rachel Trousdale shows, these poets do not just write very funny poems: they are interested in the ethical and intersubjective possibilities of humor, especially in how laughter can help people empathize or fail to empathize." - HUMOR
"For Trousdale, each poet is not merely interested in humor as a device but is also a theorist of humor whose understanding of it links to much broader concerns that course through their poetry and poetics." - Robert Zamsky, American Literary History
Формат: Скан PDf
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