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Pleasure of Fools
"Men cannot laugh heartily without showing their teeth," quipped Samuel Butler. From St Paul to Descartes to Adorno, scholars and writers have questioned the ethics of laughter - any laughter. In The Pleasure of Fools, Jure Gantar wrestles with our moral right to laugh and the limitations of contemporary critical approaches.The crucial question is not whether or not there is offensive laughter but whether or not all laughter offends. Almost everyone has felt the bitter stab of malicious laughter and knows that laughter can be cruel, but it is more difficult to decide if there is also laughter that can never insult. Through a reading of Aristophanes, Rabelais, Molière, Fielding, and Rostand, Victorian nonsense poetry, and the philosophical texts of Plato, Dante, and More, Gantar explores the reasons for critics' prejudice against comedy, the specific position of laughter in various utopian societies, and self-deprecating laughter and role of the comedian as its primary producer. His conclusions contradict basic postmodern thought and contribute to current debates on the epistemological nature of criticism.
A Life of Ethics and Performance
Ethics is, in an important sense, a matter of ‘being good’ but it is also a question about how to live a ‘good life’. This book's emphasis on the theatrical and performative and their relationship to ethics, highlights that being good is, a matter of acting good and that acting good is a question of performing (or not-performing) certain roles and duties. This book surveys the most recent work in the field of ethics and performance, organizing this research through the metaphor of ‘the good life’. Each chapter explores a question about what it means to ‘act good’ at a different point in life and thus the book moves from natality to fatality, and beyond in its meditation on the relationship between performance and life itself. In this, it offers an important contribution to the contemporary debate about the relationship between ethics, theatre and performance studies.
Uncivil Mirth
How the philosophers and polemicists of eighteenth-century Britain used ridicule in the service of religious toleration, abolition, and political justice The relaxing of censorship in Britain at the turn of the eighteenth century led to an explosion of satires, caricatures, and comic hoaxes. This new vogue for ridicule unleashed moral panic and prompted warnings that it would corrupt public debate. But ridicule also had vocal defenders who saw it as a means to expose hypocrisy, unsettle the arrogant, and deflate the powerful. Uncivil Mirth examines how leading thinkers of the period searched for a humane form of ridicule, one that served the causes of religious toleration, the abolition of t...
Humorous Political Stunts
A group of anti-conscription activists break into a prison, demanding to be jailed together with their friend already locked up because of his beliefs. Clowns from the rebel clown army mimic police sent to control political protests. Visiting Santas hand out presents taken from shop shelves without the approval of the shopping centre management. These are examples of humorous political stunts - public actions, hoaxes and happenings that confront systems of power. This book contains many amusing stories of such stunts, showing the boldness and creativity of the activists. Interviews and documents are used to show how humour can facilitate outreach, mobilisation and a culture of resistance. Humorous Political Stunts combines insights from the fields of nonviolence and humour studies and makes theoretical contributions to each area.
Designing the European Union
This book outlines the content of the main treaties that form the 'constitutional' basis of the European Union and analyses changes in these over time. The EU has expanded its policy scope and taken in many more members transferring powers to common supranational institutions in a way seen nowhere else in the world.
The Cambridge Companion to Theatre and Science
The first ever companion to theatre and science brings together research on key topics, performances, and new areas of interest.
A Concise Companion to Modernism
This concise Companion offers an innovative approach tounderstanding the Modernist literary mind in Britain, focusing onthe intellectual and cultural contexts, which shaped it. Offers an innovative approach to understanding the Modernistliterary mind in Britain. Helps readers to grasp the intellectual and cultural contextsof literary Modernism. Organised around contemporary ideas such as Freudianism andeugenics rather than literary genres. Relates literary Modernism to the overarching issues of theperiod, such as feminism, imperialism and war.
Feminism and the Religious Significance of Laughing Bodies
This book identifies the significance of the body through a feminist reconceptualisation of laughter as a means of insight. It positions itself within the emerging scholarship on religion and humour but distinguishes itself by moving away from the emphasis on humour and instead focuses on the place and role of laughter. Through a feminist reading of laughter, which is grounded in the philosophical and psychological works of William James, this book emphasises the importance of the body to offer an exploration of laughter as a means of insight. In doing so, it challenges the classificatory orders of knowledge by recognising and arguing for the value of the body in the creation of knowledge and understanding. To demonstrate the centrality of the body for insight laughter, and thus the creation of knowledge, this book engages with laughter within three thematic areas: religious experience, gendered experiences of laughter, and the ethics of laughter. This book will be of interest to students and researchers in religious studies, theology, gender studies, humour studies, philosophy, and the history of ideas.
Symptoms of the Self
"Symptoms of the Self offers the first full study of one of the most paradoxically popular figures in transatlantic theatre history: the stage consumptive. Consumption, or tuberculosis, remains one of the world's most deadly epidemic diseases; in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in France, Britain, and North America, it was a leading killer, responsible for the deaths of as many as one in four members of the population. Despite-or perhaps because of-their horrific experiences of tubercular mortality, throughout the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century audiences in these same countries flocked to see consumptive characters love, suffer, and die onstage. Beginning with th...
Jazz Matters
What, where, and when is jazz? To most of us jazz means small combos, made up mostly of men, performing improvisationally in urban club venues. But jazz has been through many changes in the decades since World War II, emerging in unexpected places and incorporating a wide range of new styles. In this engrossing new book, David Ake expands on the discussion he began in Jazz Cultures, lending his engaging, thoughtful, and stimulating perspective to post-1940s jazz. Ake investigates such issues as improvisational analysis, pedagogy, American exceptionalism, and sense of place in jazz. He uses provocative case studies to illustrate how some of the values ascribed to the postwar jazz culture are reflected in and fundamentally shaped by aspects of sound, location, and time.
