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Laughter and power are here examined in a variety of contexts, ranging from the satires of Renaissance Humanism through to the polemics of contemporary journalism. How do the powerful use laughter as a cultural weapon which reinforces their position? How do the powerless use laughter as a last resort in their self-defence? Sixteenth-century intellectuals applied their satires to a campaign against intolerance. Seventeenth-century absolutism demanded of comedy that it serve its interests. Yet subversive humour survived, even at the court, and led through the Enlightenment to its apogee in the black humour of Sade. Twentieth-century experimental fiction owes that trend a conscious debt. Meanwhile an aesthetic tradition, represented here by Flaubert, Beckett and Queneau, incites a laughter which releases tension rather than raising awareness. As humour theorists, Bergson, Freud and Koestler help focus these concerns.
List of contents
Contents: John Parkin/John Phillips: Foreword - Gaëtan Brulotte: Laughing at Power - Barbara Bowen: Obscure Men and Smelly Goats in Neo-Latin Satire - Elizabeth Woodrough: Molière, The Mufti and the Monarch: Laughter and Stage Spectacle in Le Bourgeois gentilhomme - John Phillips: 'Laugh? I nearly died!' Humour in Sade's Fiction - Walter Redfern: A Little Bird Tells Us: Parrots in Flaubert, Queneau, Beckett (and Tutti Quanti) - John Parkin: The Power of Laughter: Koestler on Bergson and Freud - John Phillips: 'L'insoutenable légèreté du rire': Laughter and Power in Milan Kundera's La Lenteur and Vivant Denon's Point de Lendemain - John Parkin: Doinel dominé: Sexual Humour in Truffaut's Antoine cycle - Patrick Corcoran: Black Humour: La Vie et demie de Sony Labou Tansi - Jane Weston: Charlie Hebdo and Joyful Resistance.
About the author
The Editors: John Parkin has lectured at Bristol University on French literature, language and culture since his appointment in 1972. He has published on a range of sixteenth-century authors, especially Rabelais, as well as editing a volume entitled
French Humour (1999) and writing a study of
Humour Theorists of the Twentieth Century (1997).
John Phillips is Professor of French Literature at London Metropolitan University. He has published widely on aspects of both eighteenth- and twentieth-century French literature, especially the French New Novel and the Marquis de Sade. Books include
Nathalie Sarraute: Metaphor, Fairy-tale and the Feminine of the Text (1994),
Forbidden Fictions: Pornography and Censorship in Twentieth-century French Literature (1999),
Sade: The Libertine Novels (2001),
How To Read Sade (2005), and
The Marquis de Sade: A Very Short Introduction (2005).
