Explore the vast range of titles available.

Did Freud present a scientific hypothesis about the unconscious, as he always maintained and as many of his disciples keep repeating? This question has long prompted debates concerning the legitimacy and usefulness of psychoanalysis, and it is of utmost importance to Lacanian analysts, whose main project has been to stress Freud's scientific grounding. Here Jacques Bouveresse, a noted authority on Ludwig Wittgenstein, contributes to the debate by turning to this Austrian-born philosopher and contemporary of Freud for a candid assessment of the early issues surrounding psychoanalysis. Wittgenstein, who himself had delivered a devastating critique of traditional philosophy, sympathetically pondered Freud's claim to have produced a scientific theory in proposing a new model of the human psyche. What Wittgenstein recognized--and what Bouveresse so eloquently stresses for today's reader--is that psychoanalysis does not aim to produce a change limited to the intellect but rather seeks to provoke an authentic change of human attitudes. The beauty behind the theory of the unconscious for Wittgenstein is that it breaks away from scientific, causal explanations to offer new forms of thinking and speaking, or rather, a new mythology. Offering a critical view of all the texts in which Wittgenstein mentions Freud, Bouveresse immerses us in the intellectual climate of Vienna in the early part of the twentieth century. Although we come to see why Wittgenstein did not view psychoanalysis as a science proper, we are nonetheless made to feel the philosopher's sense of wonder and respect for the cultural task Freud took on as he found new ways meaningfully to discuss human concerns. Intertwined in this story of Wittgenstein's grappling with the theory of the unconscious is the story of how he came to question the authority of science and of philosophy itself. While aiming primarily at the clarification of Wittgenstein's opinion of Freud, Bouveresse's book can be read as a challenge to the French psychoanalytic school of Lacan and as a provocative commentary on cultural authority.

Humor is the most celebrated of all Jewish responses to modernity. In this book, Ruth Wisse evokes and applauds the genius of spontaneous Jewish joking--as well as the brilliance of comic masterworks by writers like Heinrich Heine, Sholem Aleichem, Isaac Babel, S. Y. Agnon, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Philip Roth. At the same time, Wisse draws attention to the precarious conditions that call Jewish humor into being--and the price it may exact from its practitioners and audience. Wisse broadly traces modern Jewish humor around the world, teasing out its implications as she explores memorable and telling examples from German, Yiddish, English, Russian, and Hebrew. Among other topics, the book looks at how Jewish humor channeled Jewish learning and wordsmanship into new avenues of creativity, brought relief to liberal non-Jews in repressive societies, and enriched popular culture in the United States. Even as it invites readers to consider the pleasures and profits of Jewish humor, the book asks difficult but fascinating questions: Can the excess and extreme self-ridicule of Jewish humor go too far and backfire in the process? And is \"leave 'em laughing\" the wisest motto for a people that others have intended to sweep off the stage of history?

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Preamble: Definitions, the Human and Metamorphosis The Joke in Language Animated Portmanteau The Advent of Sound and Sonic Portmanteau Cartoon Anarchy and Noncompossibility It's All in a Name: Caricature and Parody Animated Paranomasia, Idiom, and the Parodic Grotesque The Risus Purus References

With his bald pate, inquiring intellect and slightly dweebish personality, Greg Allen of the Neo-Futurists occupies a space somewhere between actor and college professor. The impulse to educate has always been a big part of what Allen and his wacky Neo-Futurists do. It's just well hidden behind various strange and irrational behaviors.

With his typical deconstructionist panache, [Greg Allen] has penned a three-person comedy that examines the theoretical underpinnings of humor. Throughout the evening-length piece -- half lecture- demonstration and half vaudeville routine -- Allen and fellow Neo- Futurists Heather Riordan and Andy Bayiates perform various experiments in hopes of answering the questions that have plagued the greatest philosophers for aeons:

Beaumont shows how the concepts of condensation and displacement can be used to explain the intertextual relations of different narratives. The intertextual relations between the narratives of \"The Story of the First Sheikh\" and that of \"The Thousand and One Nights\" is discussed.

The particularity of white identity compels us to delineate the inextricable relation between sexual identity and racial identity. [...]we must do more than merely include the forces of public culture in pregiven theories of sexuality; we must discern how the seemingly extrafamilial signifier of race, which critics falsely consign to the public realm since it seems to invoke a collectivity, intersects with that of sex to produce the subject. [...]as Palmer observes, the joke surely has an ability to overturn social norms and restrictions on hostility. [...]a tendentious joke calls for three people: in addition to the one who makes the joke, there must be a second who is taken as the object of the hostile or sexual aggressiveness, and a tiiird in whom the joke's aim of producing pleasure is fulfilled ... it is not the person who makes the joke who laughs at it and who therefore enjoys its pleasurable effect, but the inactive listener. [...]Orwell's self-consciousness about equating whiteness with humanness discloses his capacity to interrogate the transparency of racial discourse. 11 Abrahams and Dundes argue that elephant jokes, which exploded around 1963, were disguised antiblack jokes that whites told in the face of the civil-rights movement However, Abrahams and Dundee's attempt to psychologize the joke as an oedipal narrative is problematic for reasons that I cannot take up here.

[...]the novel is generally understood by black literary scholars as a contrivance in Hurston's canon and in African-American literary scholarship.1 This perspective undoubtedly results from Hurston's depiction of white protagonists instead of black ones. The narrator also informs us that Jim is twentyfive when he arrives in Sawley and near fifty when he leaves Arvay. [...]the inscription of Arvay and Jim's children's birdi dates in a family Bible provides clear historical markers. Nowhere would the pleasure be more intense than in Seraph, where she subverts multiple racial expectations. Since the characters in Seraph sound black, Hurston did not really abandon \"the source of her unique esthetic - black cultural tradition\" insofar as language is the medium of culture. New York Times reviewer Slaughter identifies her as a hysterical neurotic. Since her feelings of dejection arise from narcissistic deficiencies, I would instead identify her core problem as a narcissistic personality disorder.