The Comedy Of Entropy

Download or read book The Comedy of Entropy written by Patrick O'Neill and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 1990-12-15 with total page 453 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Entropic comedy is the phrase coined by Patrick O'Neill in this study to identify a particular mode of twentieth-century narrative that is not generally recognized. He describes it as the narrative expression of forms of decentred humour, or what might more loosely be called 'black humour.' O'Neill begins his investigation by examining the rise of an essentially new form of humour over the last three hundred years or so in the context of a rapid decay of confidence in traditional authoritative value systems. O'Neill analyses the resulting reorganization of the spectrum of humour, and examines th implications of this for the ways in which we read texts and the world we live in. He then turns from intellectual history to narratology and considers the relationship, in theoretical terms, of homour, play, and narrative as systems of discourse and the role of the reader as a textualizing agent. Finally, he considers some dozen twentieth-century narratives in French, German, and English (with occasional reference to other literatures) in the context of those historical and theoretical concerns. Authors of the texts analysed include Céline, Camus, Satre, and Robbe-Grillet in French; Heller, Beckett, Pynchon, Nabokov, and Joyce in English; Grass, Kafka, and Handke in German. The analyses proceed along lines suggested by structuralist, semiotic, and post-structuraist narrative and literary theory. From his analyses of these works O'Neill concludes they illustrate in narrative terms a mode of modern writing definable as entropic comedy, and he develops a taxonomy of the mode.

Download or read book The Idea of Comedy written by Jan Hokenson and published by Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "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.

Download or read book Dark Humor written by Harold Bloom and published by Infobase Publishing. This book was released on 2010 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides an examination of the use of dark humor in classic literary works.

Download or read book The Ironic Temper and the Comic Imagination written by Morton Gurewitch and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Ironic Temper and the Comic Imagination examines and illuminates the role which the ironic temper plays in the creation of complex literary comedy. The book focuses on ironic comedy, though not of the kind that is characterized by the surprises and shocks, the incongruities and reversals, of circumstantial irony. Circumstantial—or situational—irony cannot stand alone; it serves, for example, the aggressive functions of satire, or the irrational impulses of farce, or the benevolent, whimsical, or pain-defeating energies of humor.

Download or read book Canetti and Nietzsche written by Harriet Murphy and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This first full-length study investigates the profound implications of the peculiarly original sense of humor found in Elias Canetti's single novel--a facetiousness, understood in a Nietzschean sense, as a revolutionary aesthetic.

Download or read book Nostalgic Postmodernism written by Christian Gutleben and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-10-18 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do so many contemporary British novels revert to the Victorian tradition in order to find a new source of inspiration? What does it mean from an ideological point of view to build a modern form of art by resurrecting and recycling an art of the past? From a formal point of view what are the aesthetic priorities established by these postmodernist novels? Those are the main questions tackled by this study intended for anybody interested in the aesthetic and ideological evolution of very recent fiction. What this analysis ultimately proposes is a reevaluation and a redefinition of postmodernism such as it is illustrated by the British novels which paradoxically both praise and mock, honour and debunk, imitate and subvert their Victorian models. Unashamedly opportunistic and deliberately exploiting the spirit of the time, this late form of postmodernism cannibalizes and reshapes not only Victorianism but all the other previous aesthetic movements - including early postmodernism.

Download or read book The Comedy of Entropy written by Patrick O'Neill and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Entropic comedy is the phrase coined by Patrick O'Neill in this study to identify a particular mode of twentieth-century narrative that is not generally recognized. He describes it as the narrative expression of forms of decentred humour, or what might more loosely be called 'black humour.' O'Neill begins his investigation by examining the rise of an essentially new form of humour over the last three hundred years or so in the context of a rapid decay of confidence in traditional authoritative value systems. O'Neill analyses the resulting reorganization of the spectrum of humour, and examines th implications of this for the ways in which we read texts and the world we live in. He then turns from intellectual history to narratology and considers the relationship, in theoretical terms, of homour, play, and narrative as systems of discourse and the role of the reader as a textualizing agent. Finally, he considers some dozen twentieth-century narratives in French, German, and English (with occasional reference to other literatures) in the context of those historical and theoretical concerns. Authors of the texts analysed include Céline, Camus, Satre, and Robbe-Grillet in French; Heller, Beckett, Pynchon, Nabokov, and Joyce in English; Grass, Kafka, and Handke in German. The analyses proceed along lines suggested by structuralist, semiotic, and post-structuraist narrative and literary theory. From his analyses of these works O'Neill concludes they illustrate in narrative terms a mode of modern writing definable as entropic comedy, and he develops a taxonomy of the mode.