M & D Group Read "Make 'Em Laugh"...

[alice malice]

http://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1233&context=wwqr

http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/438700?sid=21105465595391&uid=4&uid=3739256&uid=2&uid=3739832



On Thu, Feb 26, 2015 at 1:05 PM, alice malice <alicewmalice at gmail.com> wrote:
> Back when Melville was writing there was much debate about the use of
> humor and Melville, and Hawthorne, believe it or not, were on the side
> that argued for laughter over wit, comedy over satire. How could
> America have satire when, unlike the nations of Europe, it had few
> institutions of fixed power and corruptions, and many evolving and
> devloping norms? Of course, these were taking hold, as the Chapter on
> Fast Fish in Moby-Dick, a critique of America's Imperial ambitions,
> shows, but America was not yet the New Empire. This would take time,
> and produce works like Catch 22 & Co., but also new generation of
> writers who seem to return to Melville's Blackmess, and Hawthorn'es
> for that matter, with an ironic Blackness of their own; though the
> term "Black Humor" is somewhat tainted, so Fables of Subversion.
>
> Fables of Subversion: Satire and the American Novel
>
> by Steven C. Weisenburger
>
> Drawing on more than thirty novels by nineteen writers, Fables of
> Subversion is both a survey of mid-twentieth century American fiction
> and a study of how these novels challenged the conventions of satire.
> Steven Weisenburger focuses on the rise of a radically subversive mode
> of satire from 1930 to 1980. This postmodern satire, says
> Weisenburger, stands in crucial opposition to corrective, normative
> satire, which has served a legitimizing function by generating,
> through ridicule, a consensus on values. Weisenburger argues that
> satire in this generative mode does not participate in the
> oppositional, subversive work of much twentieth-century art.
>
> Chapters focus on theories of satire, early subversions of satiric
> conventions by Nathanael West, Flannery O'Connor, and John Hawkes, the
> flowering of "Black Humor" fictions of the sixties, and the forms of
> political and encyclopedic satire prominent throughout the period.
> Many of the writers included here, such as Vladimir Nabokov, William
> Gaddis, Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Coover, and Thomas Pynchon, are
> acknowledged masters of contemporary humor. Others, such as Mary
> McCarthy, Chester Himes, James Purdy, Charles Wright, and Ishmael
> Reed, have not previously been considered in this context.
>
> Posing a seminal challenge to existing theories of satire, Fables of
> Subversion explores the iconoclastic energies of the new satires as a
> driving force in late modern and post-modern novel writing.
>
> On Thu, Feb 26, 2015 at 8:17 AM, Johnny Marr <marrja at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Not sure, I find the Paranoids section of TCOL49 very funny. I do appreciate
>> your wider point, that TRP's intentionally writing in a more humorous
>> fashion, but then he's always favoured the picaresque.
>>
>>
>> On Thursday, February 26, 2015, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Becky writes: This novel has some very serious themes, but told with a
>>> LOT of humor - not just humor to lighten the atmosphere -there's
>>> actually a comic tone.
>>>
>>> So true..a friend of mine thinking of reading it for the first time,
>>> dipped in...so hilarious, he said (and he knows some other Pynchons).
>>>
>>> Laughs, laughs everywhere. Maybe another part of the Tale-Telling
>>> meaning: Make 'Em Laugh, Make 'Em Laugh, Make 'Em Laugh.
>>> This tone may not be seen in any other work until INHERENT VICE?? he
>>> says controversially.
>>> -
>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l