A "sad and corrupt" age, a period of "crisis" and "upheaval"--what T.S. Eliot famously summed up as "the panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history." Modernism has always been characterized by its self-conscious sense of suffering. Why, then, was it so obsessed with laughter? From Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Bergson and Freud to Pirandello, Beckett, Hughes, Barnes, and Joyce, no moment in cultural history has written about laughter this much. James Nikopoulos investigates modernity's paradoxical relationship with mirth. Why was the gesture we conventionally associate with happiness deemed the only sensible way of responding to a world, as Max Weber wrote, that had been "disenchanted of its gods?" In answering these questions, Nikopoulos also delves into our ongoing relationship with laughter. He looks to contemporary research in emotion and evolutionary theory, as well as to the two-thousand-plus-year history of the philosophy of humor, in order to propose a novel way of understanding laughter, humor, and their complicated relationships with modern life.The Stability of Laughter explores how art unsettles the simplifications we revert to in our attempts to make sense of human history and social interaction.
Author(s): James Nikopoulos
Edition: Hardcover
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2018
Language: English
Pages: 270
Cover......Page 1
Half Title......Page 2
Series Page......Page 3
Title Page......Page 4
Copyright Page......Page 5
Contents......Page 6
Acknowledgments......Page 8
Introduction......Page 10
A Note on Methodology......Page 13
A Note on Style and Organization......Page 16
PART I......Page 24
1 Laughter, In Theory and In Practice......Page 26
The Stabilities of Laughter......Page 28
2 Our Miserable Modernity and Its Myriad Laughters......Page 52
The Grumpiest of Times......Page 54
Laughing at Modernity......Page 61
Laughing with Modernity......Page 64
A More Authentic Joy......Page 68
3 Stories of Comic Experience......Page 82
Varieties of Painful Laughter: Malicious, Nervous, Pathological......Page 83
Against Irony......Page 90
The Activism of Naivety......Page 92
In Praise of Play......Page 95
The Meaningfulness of Meaninglessness......Page 98
4 Laughter? Joyous?......Page 114
PART II......Page 118
5 Pathology, In Theory: Baudelaire—Evolving into Laughter......Page 120
6 Pathology, In Practice: Lu Xun’s “Diary of a Madman” and T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”......Page 131
7 Individuality, In Theory: Nietzsche—Become Your Laughter......Page 147
Joy Persists......Page 153
Spontaneity Acquires Meaning......Page 155
Modernity Ridens......Page 158
8 Individuality, In Practice: Ulysses’ Scrupulous Gestures......Page 170
Confecting Character......Page 171
Confecting a Cosmos......Page 178
Characterizing a Cosmos......Page 183
9 Absurdity, In Theory: Pirandello—Making Pain Funny......Page 199
Enter Pirandello......Page 201
Comedy Is Tragedy Minus Time......Page 206
10 Absurdity, In Practice: A World Worthy of Its Laughter—Barnes, Beckett, Hughes, Svevo......Page 224
Absurdity Is Unjust; Injustice Is Absurd......Page 226
The Certainty with Which We Suffer......Page 227
“Our Next Gesture Permitted Our Next Misunderstanding . . .”......Page 230
Excepting the Rule......Page 233
On the Seventh Day......Page 235
Epilogue: Kafka’s Primate......Page 250
Index......Page 260
