The Idea of Comedy: History, Theory, CritiqueOne of the few constants in Western critical though for over twomillennia has been the inexhaustible fascination with comedy: what itis and how it works. Yet comedy has eluded every definition. Why haveso many of the leading critics and philosophers of the West proposedtheories and counter-theories of comedy while often admitting that itenthralls and baffles the mind in equal measure? The Idea of Comedy: A Critique assembles a rich corpus of materials from differentlanguages and eras to construct a history of the commentaries andreflections, the theoretical postulates and conjectures, and the oftenacrimonious debates about comedy through the centuries from Platoand Aristotle to our contemporaries |
Contents
23 | |
24 | |
31 | |
Early Modernist Theory | 42 |
Theory and Resistance | 55 |
The Dominant Modernist Conception of Comedy Premises and Elisions | 64 |
Modernist Residua of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries | 66 |
The Dominant Satiric NeoAristotelian View | 83 |
The Medieval Fool Tradition | 150 |
Fooling Theory | 162 |
The Interlude of Postmodernist Conceptions | 173 |
Late Century Overview | 174 |
The Ludic Terrain of Postmodern Theory | 193 |
Comedy in Contemporary Thought | 205 |
The Butts of Reason | 217 |
The Return of Systems and Aesthetics | 232 |
The Legacy of the Dominant Through 2000 | 98 |
The Late Modernist Conception of Comedy Premises and Elisions | 109 |
The Emergent Populist Theory | 110 |
The Comic Hero and Modernist Legacies | 120 |
Twin Modernist Elisions | 143 |
The Contemporary Idea of Comedy | 247 |
The Idea of Comedy | 253 |
Comedy as an Idea | 259 |
Reference List | 267 |
279 | |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
aesthetic analysis archetypal argues Aristophanes Aristotelian Aristotle Aristotle's audience Bakhtin Bergson carnival century cial cognitive comedy's comic butt comic canon comic character comic forms comic hero comic mode comic texts comic theory comic writers construct contemporary critical discourse critique culture deviance dominant drama entails ethical Falstaff farce festive Flieger folly fool figure Freud Freudian Frye Frye's function Gelven Genette genres German Romantic Glasgow human humor ical idea of comedy incongruity individual intellectual ironic irony joke language laugh laughter Le Rire literary ludic mask medieval medieval comic medieval fool mocking modern modernist modernist theories Molière moral nature Nietzsche notion philosophical Plato play pleasure plot populist populist view postmodern postmodernist premise psychic Purdie reason Renaissance ridiculous ritual satiric seems Shershow social norms society socio-moral spectator standard structure superego superiority theoretical theorists theory of comedy thesis thought tion Torrance tradition tragedy truth unconscious values