Abstract
This chapter examines the challenges and rewards peculiar to teaching comic narrative. Readers frequently respond to humor as trivial, so students who expect readings in university courses to be ‘important’ often fail to recognize when a text is also funny. Instead, they find these texts confusing: why do the characters behave so illogically and say such contradictory things? Recognizing humor can be even more difficult when a text’s comic elements depend on unfamiliar references, or when the subject matter is shocking. But jokes often provide the focal point for a text’s thematic components, and are often where apparently contradictory ideas are brought into productive conflict. Using examples from Tom Stoppard, Sterling Brown and Virginia Woolf, and drawing on theories of humor from Plato to Bergson, this chapter will examine ways to help students see how comic narratives construct substantive philosophical and political arguments.
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Notes
- 1.
As Sos Eltis notes, such reactions to Wilde’s absurdity are not uncommon (Eltis 2008: 101).
- 2.
See, for example, Stan Smith’s discussion of how critics like F. R. Leavis and Donald Davie disapprovingly link W. H. Auden’s humor to his homosexuality (Smith 2004: 96).
- 3.
I prefer to focus on this theoretical background rather than, for example, a history of comic genre, because the theories’ contradictory and sometimes unsatisfying accounts of why we laugh provoke students to engage in complex analysis of the texts at hand, whereas a history of comedy lends itself more towards simple classification (this text is a comedy of manners, this one is a political satire, etc.).
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Trousdale, R. (2018). Teaching Comic Narratives. In: Jacobs, R. (eds) Teaching Narrative. Teaching the New English. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71829-3_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71829-3_5
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