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Literature is one of the richest sources of information concerning the ways in which human beings play with cognition. Human cognition is grounded in the ability to feel, perceive, and move.
Kinesic Humor examines literary works written in different languages and various historical periods, in which the cognitive processing of gestures and kinesic interactions trigger humorous effects. By bringing together literary studies, cognitive studies, gesture studies, and humor studies, this book offers an original perspective on literary artworks such as Chrétien de Troyes'
Yvain, Milton's
Paradise Lost, Cervantes'
Don Quixote, Rousseau's
Confessions, Sterne's
Tristram Shandy, and Stendhal's
Le Rouge et le Noir.
List of contents
- Introduction: Kinesic Humor and the Dynamics of Gesture
- Chapter One: Milton: Surprised By Humor
- Chapter Two: Sterne: The Naturalness of a Toe Movement
- Chapter Three: Saint-Simon: Speed and Touch, or How to Push a Duke
- Chapter Four: Rousseau: Fast Breathing and Trembling Hands
- Chapter Five: Stendhal: Walking Styles and Emotional Practice
- Chapter Six: Ovid and Chrétien de Troyes: Pyramus, Thisbe, and Yvain's Hypersensitive Lion
- Chapter Seven: Cervantes: Laughing at a Metaphor
- Conclusion: Jacques Tati and Eddie Izzard
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
Guillemette Bolens is Professor of Medieval and Comparative Literature at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. Her research interests are in the history of the body, kinesic intelligence, gestures, and embodied cognition in visual and verbal arts. She is the author of La Logique du corps articulaire: les articulations du corps humain dans la littérature occidentale (2000/2007), for which she was awarded the Latsis Prize and the Hélène and Victor Barbour Prize for Literary Criticism; The Style of Gestures: Embodiment and Cognition in Literary Narrative (2012; first published in French in 2008), and L'Humour et le savoir des corps: Don Quichotte, Tristram Shandy et le rire du lecteur (2016).
Summary
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.
The triggers of laughter in spoken language or conversation can often be very simple, such as a change in gesture, or in vocal tone or tempo. Speakers and listeners understand these dynamics of gesture through motor cognition and use them to great effect. The causes of laughter and the experience of humor in written texts, however, are less well understood. In Kinesic Humor, Guillemette Bolens offers a cognitive poetics-based study of triggers of laughter in texts, focusing in particular on tonic shifts and gesture in plot and narrative.
Bolens shows how literary texts from a variety of periods provide remarkably precise information concerning kinesthesia, the role of tonicity in communication, and the impact of momentum, timing, and tempo on the way in which gestures are processed in human exchanges. She investigates the narrative use of such parameters and how they prompt laughter in a wide-ranging corpus of major authors that includes Chrétien de Troyes, Cervantes, Milton, Saint-Simon, Rousseau, Sterne, and Stendhal. Using the theory of embodied cognition, Bolens shows how thwarted perceptions and expectations of movements and sensations produce the cognitive shifts typical of humor. Bringing together narratology, cognitive studies, gesture studies, humor studies, and historical context, this book offers original perspectives on important artworks and represents a major contribution to cognitive poetics.
Originally published in French as L'Humour et le savoir des corps in 2016, this volume not only brings the work to an English-speaking audience for the first time but expands significantly on the original by analyzing a new corpus of texts and engaging with recent advances in the field to develop a cutting-edge theory of kinesic humor.
Additional text
Kinesic humor—triggered by surprising shifts in the rhythm of gestures—is an important aspect of human sociality; but it takes a scholar of Bolens's brilliance and interdisciplinary expertise to demonstrate that literature can create textual contexts for such humor in the most unexpected places. Embodied cognition is at the heart of the game that literature plays with the reader, and that game, Bolens shows us, is both poignant and funny.
