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"Modernism (Aesthetics) Humor."
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It's lonely in the modern world : the essential guide to form, function, and ennui from the creators of UnhappyHipsters.com
\"This comprehensive information-rich guide from the creators to the hugely popluar Web site UnhappyHipsters.com outlines exactly what's require to create a modern home.\" -- Jacket flap.
Book
Bending steel : modernity and the American superhero
“Faster than a speeding bullet. More powerful than a locomotive. Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound . . . It’s Superman!” Bending Steel examines the historical origins and cultural significance of Superman and his fellow American crusaders. Cultural historian Aldo J. Regalado asserts that the superhero seems a direct response to modernity, often fighting the interrelated processes of industrialization, urbanization, immigration, and capitalism that transformed the United States from the early nineteenth century to the present. Reeling from these exciting but rapid and destabilizing forces, Americans turned to heroic fiction as a means of explaining national and personal identities to themselves and to the world. In so doing, they created characters and stories that sometimes affirmed, but other times subverted conventional notions of race, class, gender, and nationalism.
The cultural conversation articulated through the nation’s early heroic fiction eventually led to a new heroic type—the brightly clad, super-powered, pro-social action heroes that first appeared in American comic books starting in the late 1930s. Although indelibly shaped by the Great Depression and World War II sensibilities of the second-generation immigrants most responsible for their creation, comic book superheroes remain a mainstay of American popular culture.
Tracing superhero fiction all the way back to the nineteenth century, Regalado firmly bases his analysis of dime novels, pulp fiction, and comics in historical, biographical, and reader response sources. He explores the roles played by creators, producers, and consumers in crafting superhero fiction, ultimately concluding that these narratives are essential for understanding vital trajectories in American culture.
eBook
\Children, this is what a Squirrel Looks Like\-a Journey Through Polish Post-war Architecture in Caricature
This article explores the state of Polish architecture as portrayed by Polish caricaturists, with a particular focus on the 1960s, a period that marked the conclusion of post-war reconstruction and the emergence of new spatial planning strategies -back to Modernism. These architectural developments are examined both through textual analysis and satirical illustrations from the era. Humor and satire have long played a significant role in Polish society, serving as vital components of public discourse. Satirical drawings, in particular, were once a prominent feature of newspapers and magazines, offering a distorted yet perceptive reflection of Polish reality in PRL (Polish People's Republic). The illustrations presented in this study are sourced from the collection of the Eryk Lipiñski Museum of Caricature in Warsaw.
Journal Article
Laughing with, Laughing at
Abstract The autumn of 2019 was characterised by an eruption of global protests, including Lebanon, Iraq, Ecuador, Chile, and Egypt. The velocity with which these protests emerged nurtured a sense that the Global South ‘was on the march’. At the same time as these events were rapidly unfolding, the world's premier mass art exhibition, the Venice Biennale, was in its final weeks. Harnessing discourse analysis, participant observation, and collaborative auto-ethnography, the authors draw together a comparative study of the Chilean and Egyptian pavilions and assess the impact of ongoing and suspended revolutionary histories of both nations. Approaching art as a form of ‘practical aesthetics’ (Bennett 2012) and focusing on humour as an aesthetic quality enmeshed in complex political temporalities, this article analyses the relationship between humour, contemporary art, and revolution, demonstrating how the laughter facilitated by these two pavilions negotiates understandings of national pasts, and uprisings in the present.
Journal Article
Churchill Show: Transgressing language codes and upsetting stereotypes
Cultural productions on television and/or online platforms are immensely prolific at expressing the peoples’ every day and the historical. They provide platforms on which actors express themselves on their own terms, in their own language codes and styles with little censure. With the proliferation of digital technologies and the advent of the internet and attendant new media, the production, circulation, and consumption of cultural texts on the (Eastern) African scene has radically shifted and continues to grow in ways unimagined before. In Kenya specifically, with an exponential growth of television channels, numerous local cultural productions continue to burgeon, carrying with them a constellation of voices that are representative of the country’s socio-cultural and linguistic diversity. These productions not only entertain, but also explore critical issues in Kenyan society and beyond. Among them is Churchill Show, which through an aesthetics of escapism, (re)narrates quotidian events and recuperates and (re)interprets the country’s historical trajectory. Moreover, the show oftentimes embodies a political aesthetics cloaked in postmodern humour that serves to recalibrate common/sensical perceptions as well as the regimented practices and ways of knowing. Thus, the show transgresses language codes and upsets socio-psychological stereotypes, for which it is often condemned, to shape a new notion of ‘Kenyanness’.
Journal Article
Introduction: The Scales of Decadence
Recent scholars have been captivated by the indeterminate potentialities that decadence sets not in contradiction to, but in disarming misstep with, Victorian claims of individual, social, and global systems operating harmoniously toward a singular order. These systems also happened to privilege the aspirations of the middle class, the patriarchal machinery, white British colonial expansionism, and anthropocentric privilege. In a scene in The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), Oscar Wilde offers a particularly pithy encapsulation of this effective obliqueness and extensibility of decadence in relation to cultural norms. The character Algernon enters the room and, on seeing his endearing cousin Gwendolen, offers the complement, “Dear me, you are smart,” to which she replies, “I am always smart!” The retort's brash overconfidence is diluted by the sense that Gwendolen perhaps misunderstood what Algernon meant; he was complementing her looks, but she may have thought he was referring to her intellect. If so, then she is clearly not as sharp as she claims. But even if she did understand him and was, like him, referring to her appearance, the comment is destabilizing; it renders flat Algernon's attempt to complement her as particularly appealing at this particular moment. Either way, her response is somehow off. And when her suitor Jack follows up this bit of banter by declaring Gwendolen “quite perfect,” she again rebuffs the complement: “Oh! I hope I am not that. It would leave no room for developments, and I intend to develop in many directions.” The humor arises because of Gwendolen charmingly construing the conventional for the philosophical, her seeming inability quite to understand what others mean, her way of taking a simple compliment and scaling it up almost to the level of the epistemological or metaphysical.
Journal Article
Stand-up Comedy as Contemporary Live Theatre
Stand-up comedy is a new subgenre of comedy that widely watches across the globe. It is a form of aesthetic performance that elicits laughter and also brings succour and mirth to its audience. Its therapeutic mode, although temporal, gives a thorough and sound approach to life's issues in a mild way. Stand-up comedy show has been proven to be one of the major components of pleasurable shows. However, many scholars viewed stand-up comedy as mere entertainment and humorous show without taking a deeper look at its theatrical performance. Therefore, this paper examines stand-up comedy as a contemporary live theatre. Besides, it investigates the dialoguing conversational techniques of characters, paralinguistic features of the stage play and the use of music, symbolism, caricature, subtle irony, humour, blazer costume, improvisation and interactivity in a bid to show stand-comedy as a contemporary live theatre. Schechner's Performance, Freudian and Jungian psychoanalytic theories were used to analyse the aesthetic unique performances of the stand-up comedians. The purposively selected stand-up comedian for stage show is Klint De Drunk (Ahamefula Igwemba) and supported by Basket Mouth (Bright Okpocha). Live digital discs of performance recordings of Klint De Drunk were used. Data were subjected to performance and literary analyses.
Journal Article
“Now someone’s talking”: Unpunctuation and the Deadpan Poem
Although it is evident that unpunctuation alters not only the look but the spirit of any poem, its sources and consequences have not been laid out at length. There are no studies of unpunctuation’s workings in specifically modern, comic poetry, my topic here.3 This neglect may stem from a sense that the effects are as varied as the practitioners: what can Don Marquis’s satirical archy and mehitabel (1916–36) have in common with the wildly allusive quatrains of Harryette Mullen’s Muse & Drudge (1995)? Although this typographical deviation is used by a disparate array of twentieth- and twenty-first -century writers, the poems they produce are drawn together by the ways that minimalist punctuation changes their voices. It creates a poem usefully described as deadpan: it suppresses, plays down, or disguises tone. The poetic deadpan fuses a nineteenth-century interest in flatness as sign of deep interiority with an early twentieth-century skepticism about depths and subjectivity. Managing simultaneously to imply a self and to avoid dictating its emotions to the reader, it plays a speaking voice against an inscrutable interior.
Journal Article
A Good Laugh Is Hard to Find: From Destructive Satire to Sacramental Humor in Evelyn Waugh's Helena
Despite Evelyn Waugh’s conviction that Helena (1950) was his greatest work, the novel receives less critical attention than his well-known interwar satires and his postwar hit, Brideshead Revisited (1945). This article argues that the novel accomplishes Waugh’s self-conscious postwar effort to rehouse his satiric impulses in a mode that resists both the “dark” laughter of modernism and the sentimentality risked in mid-century Catholic fiction. With metafictive attention to genre and style, Helena exemplifies what this article terms “sacramental humor.” Waugh’s fictionalized St. Helena embodies the contrast between satire that seeks to correct or destroy and humor that seeks to heal.
Journal Article
On the Mortification of Novelistic Discourse in Three Novels
This paper argues for a specific labour of form in the so-called
Trilogy
, namely, the irreversible mortification of novelistic discourse. The great three-novel sequence is the literary space in which Beckett contrived to have done with his most dangerous temptations towards \"life and invention\", in and around the generic tar-pits of the comic novel. With implacable resolve, the author laid out before him the generic coordinates - novelistic narration; novelistic description; novelistic characterization; and the novelistic calibration of 'opinions' - only to take each to the internal limit of its humanistic delusion. The result is a leave-taking with a difference: not the sudden supersession or heroic vanquishing of 'novelism', but its laborious mortification, in order to immunise the promise of some form to come against the lingering infections of a now undead genre. Beckett's path through the novel was immanent, subjecting it to a process of degradation and internal dissolution, rather than attacking it through satire or side-stepping it altogether. The new form toward which he was reaching could only be attained through this patient and systematic dismantlement of the novel form from within its own coordinates. Reviewing the accelerating and metastasizing immanent critique from novel to novel in the
Trilogy
, this essay demonstrates how remorseless and logical it was, and how the momentum it gained served an aesthetic ambition that was also a biographical purgation: never again would Beckett attempt a novel. From this point forward, prose was liberated to serve non-novelistic ends.
Journal Article