Madness, Masks, and Laughter: An Essay on ComedyFairleigh Dickinson Univ Press, 1995 - Počet stran: 387 "Madness, Masks, and Laughter: An Essay on Comedy is an exploration of narrative and dramatic comedy as a laughter-inducing phenomenon. The theatrical metaphors of mask, appearance, and illusion are used as structural linchpins in an attempt to categorize the many and extremely varied manifestations of comedy and to find out what they may have in common with one another. As this reliance on metaphor suggests, the purpose is less to produce The Truth about comedy than to look at how it is related to our understanding of the world and to ways of understanding our understanding. Previous theories of comedy or laughter (such as those advanced by Hobbes, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Bergson, Freud, and Bakhtin) as well as more general philosophical considerations are discussed insofar as they shed light on this approach. The limitations of the metaphors themselves mean that sight is never lost of the deep-seated ambiguity that has made laughter so notoriously difficult to pin down in the past." "The first half of the volume focuses in particular on traditional comic masks and the pleasures of repetition and recognition, on the comedy of imposture, disguise, and deception, on dramatic and verbal irony, on social and theatrical role-playing and the comic possibilities of plays-within-plays and "metatheatre," as well as on the cliches, puns, witticisms, and torrents of gibberish which betray that language itself may be understood as a sort of mask. The second half of the book moves to the other side of the footlights to show how the spectators themselves, identifying with the comic spectacle, may be induced to "drop" their own roles and postures, laughter here operating as something akin to a ventilatory release from the pressures of social or cognitive performance. Here the essay examines the subversive madness inherent in comedy, its displaced anti-authoritarianism, as well as the violence, sexuality, and bodily grotesqueness it may bring to light. The structural tensions in this broadly Hobbesian or Freudian model of a social mask concealing an anti-social self are reflected in comedy's own ambivalences, and emerge especially in the ambiguous concepts of madness and folly, which may be either celebrated as festive fun or derided as sinfulness. The study concludes by considering the ways in which nonsense and the grotesque may infringe our cognitive limitations, here extending the distinction between appearance and reality to a metaphysical level which is nonetheless prey to unresolvable ambiguities." "The scope of the comic material ranges over time from Aristophanes to Martin Amis, from Boccaccio, Chaucer, Rabelais, and Shakespeare to Oscar Wilde, Joe Orton, John Barth, and Philip Roth. Alongside mainly Old Greek, Italian, French, Irish, English, and American examples, a number of relatively little-known German plays (by Grabbe, Tieck, Buchner, and others) are also taken into consideration."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved |
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Strana 17
... attention towards other play frames such as joke - telling situations and the temporary licence sanctioned by plebeian festivities and carnival celebration , for these run parallel to and in certain respects illuminate the laughter ...
... attention towards other play frames such as joke - telling situations and the temporary licence sanctioned by plebeian festivities and carnival celebration , for these run parallel to and in certain respects illuminate the laughter ...
Strana 18
... attention . As the psychologist Bateson has observed , 11 the play - face , or " this is play " signal , is fundamentally paradoxical . Like Epimenides's example of the Cretan who held that all Cretans are liars , it consists of a ...
... attention . As the psychologist Bateson has observed , 11 the play - face , or " this is play " signal , is fundamentally paradoxical . Like Epimenides's example of the Cretan who held that all Cretans are liars , it consists of a ...
Strana 22
... attention to the props or by talking about the audience ) , fan- tastic , absurd , and irrealistic comedies ( which do not engender the illu- sion of being " real " or " true " ) , as well as plays that contain the device of a play ...
... attention to the props or by talking about the audience ) , fan- tastic , absurd , and irrealistic comedies ( which do not engender the illu- sion of being " real " or " true " ) , as well as plays that contain the device of a play ...
Strana 32
... attention to itself as such . With Chapter 6 ( " Discarding the Social Mask " ) , attention now switches to the other side of the footlights , to investigate the way a com- edy may cause its spectators empathetically to " drop " their ...
... attention to itself as such . With Chapter 6 ( " Discarding the Social Mask " ) , attention now switches to the other side of the footlights , to investigate the way a com- edy may cause its spectators empathetically to " drop " their ...
Strana 33
... attention to its own struc- turedness . The masks worn by the figures of the commedia dell'arte show the connection between mask and repetition in a way that can be taken as paradigmatic . The very sight of the demoniacal half : mask of ...
... attention to its own struc- turedness . The masks worn by the figures of the commedia dell'arte show the connection between mask and repetition in a way that can be taken as paradigmatic . The very sight of the demoniacal half : mask of ...
Obsah
9 | |
13 | |
16 | |
25 | |
33 | |
Mask and Acting | 45 |
Language as a Mask | 64 |
Gibberish and Logorrhea | 74 |
A Mad World | 178 |
Nobodys Business | 191 |
The Political Mask | 213 |
The Woman on Top | 228 |
The Ethical Mask | 241 |
Taboo or not Taboo | 253 |
Gone with the Wind | 292 |
The Cognitive Mask | 309 |
Wit and Wordplay | 80 |
Wit and Puns | 90 |
Wit and InversionReversalSubversion | 100 |
Cracking the Mask | 108 |
Rupturing the Illusion | 128 |
Moments of DisIllusion | 142 |
Discarding the Social Mask | 161 |
Describing the Nondescript | 318 |
Bottoms Up | 342 |
Notes | 351 |
Bibliography | 369 |
Index | 380 |
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actor aesthetic ambivalence appearance Aristophanes audience bawdy become Brighella carnival causality chap character cliché Clown cognitive comedy comic comic potential commedia commedia dell'arte concept context Don Quixote dramatic draws attention Estragon example fact Falstaff farce festive fiction fictive Figaro figure Finnegans Wake folly fool Frankfurt-am-Main Freud function grotesque happy ending hidden hiding histrionic human humor Ibid identity illusion inversion irony joke Kant language laugh laughter Lenny Bruce likewise madness Martin Amis master meaning metaphor metatheatrical mocked Molière Molière's monomanic Montdory moral narrator nature nonsense norm normally Panurge paradox parody performance perspective play pleasure political potential puns Rabelais reader reality repetition reversal role role-playing satire scene Schopenhauer self-deception semantic sense servant sexual slave social mask sort spectator structured superego takes theatre theatrical thing-in-itself things tion topsy-turvy tradition Tristram Shandy truth turn verbal Volpone Werke women wordplay words
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Strana 84 - For, wit lying most in the assemblage of ideas, and putting those together with quickness and variety wherein can be found any resemblance or congruity, thereby to make up pleasant pictures and agreeable visions in the fancy ; judgment, on the contrary, lies quite on the other side, in separating carefully one from another ideas wherein can be found the least difference, thereby to avoid being misled by similitude and by affinity to take one thing for another.
Strana 192 - It ascends me into the brain ; dries me there all the foolish and dull and crudy vapours which environ it; makes it apprehensive, quick, forgetive, full of nimble, fiery and delectable shapes; which, deliver'd o'er to the voice, the tongue, which is the birth, becomes excellent wit.
Strana 155 - And let those that play your clowns, speak no more than is set down for them : for there be of them, that will themselves laugh, to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too ; though, in the mean time, some necessary question of the play be then to be considered: that's villainous; and . shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it.
Strana 42 - Sudden glory' is the passion which maketh those 'grimaces' called 'laughter'; and is caused either by some sudden act of their own that pleaseth them, or by the apprehension of some deformed thing in another by comparison whereof they suddenly applaud themselves.
Strana 46 - Now affectation proceeds from one of these two causes, vanity or hypocrisy; for as vanity puts us on affecting false characters, in order to purchase applause; so hypocrisy sets us on an endeavour to avoid censure, by concealing our vices under an appearance of their opposite virtues.
Strana 203 - For I believe the most sober men, when they walk alone without care and employment of the mind, would be unwilling the vanity and extravagance of their thoughts at that time should be publicly seen; which is a confession that passions unguided are for the most part mere madness.
Strana 272 - And in this, sir, I am of so nice and singular a humour, that if I thought you was able to form the least judgment or probable conjecture to yourself of what was to come in the next page, I would tear it out of my book.
Strana 194 - tis no matter; Honor pricks me on. Yea, but how if Honor prick me off when I come on ? how then ? Can Honor set to a leg ? No. Or an arm ? No. Or take away the grief of a wound ? No. Honor hath no skill in surgery then ? No. What is Honor ? A word. What is in that word, Honor ? What is that Honor ? Air. A trim reckoning ! Who hath it ? He that died o