Pub Date : 2021-12-16DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192895714.003.0008
Rachel Trousdale
Twenty-first-century poets use humor to examine and convey different kinds of knowledge—cultural, scientific, and emotional. Laughter in the work of poets like Raymond McDaniel, Stephanie Burt, Cathy Park Hong, Albert Goldbarth, Kim Rosenfield, Jamaal May, Patricia Lockwood, and Lucille Clifton prompts us to examine competing epistemologies. These poets examine how we exchange the material of laughter, and expose the ways that affective responses can determine what we think we know. They show how laughter can re-shape our sense of canons and render unfamiliar material accessible, expanding our literary knowledge and the sympathetic capacities that knowledge carries with it. They demonstrate how laughter breaks down categories like “science” and “literature,” expanding the kinds of knowledge that we value as “fact.” At the same time, they warn that laughter’s power to heal trauma or mediate other minds is limited, and that we should not trust humorous insights too far.
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Pub Date : 2021-12-16DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192895714.003.0002
Rachel Trousdale
Auden’s late-thirties light verse and serious poetry use humor to construct a community of readers and fellow-poets. His humor and his poetics are programmatically anti-Fascist, rejecting the notion of the poet as “exceptional person” and treating literary tradition as potentially malleable and inclusive. For Auden, humor is both individuating and a way to identify like-minded people; more unusually, when it is based on potentially accessible literary knowledge, it also invites outsiders to join the poet’s community. Humor and laughter turn out to provide ways to extend the profound, life-changing intersubjectivity of love—the empathy we feel for our beloved—to a community beyond the dyad of lovers.
{"title":"“Tell me the Truth”","authors":"Rachel Trousdale","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192895714.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192895714.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"Auden’s late-thirties light verse and serious poetry use humor to construct a community of readers and fellow-poets. His humor and his poetics are programmatically anti-Fascist, rejecting the notion of the poet as “exceptional person” and treating literary tradition as potentially malleable and inclusive. For Auden, humor is both individuating and a way to identify like-minded people; more unusually, when it is based on potentially accessible literary knowledge, it also invites outsiders to join the poet’s community. Humor and laughter turn out to provide ways to extend the profound, life-changing intersubjectivity of love—the empathy we feel for our beloved—to a community beyond the dyad of lovers.","PeriodicalId":262367,"journal":{"name":"Humor, Empathy, and Community in Twentieth-Century American Poetry","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130091711","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-16DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192895714.003.0004
Rachel Trousdale
Eliot’s humor frequently resembles the superiority-based models of Freud and Bergson. His humor in letters is often racist, misogynist, and homophobic. But he also uses laughter to examine failed communication and the limits of sympathy among reader, speaker, and subject. From depictions of laughing characters in Prufrock and Other Observations to the merriment in Old Possum’s Practical Cats, Eliot treats laughter itself, rather than the joke provoking it, as a form of communication conveying truths language cannot. Eliot’s laughter comes from doubt. His comedy is both superiority-based and empathic: amusement reminds Eliot of his own failures. Eliot’s self-conscious laughter becomes a unique vehicle for communication between artist and audience, if not between individuals. In The Waste Land, tragicomic moments teach readers to be skeptical of their own satirical impulses, and almost bridge the abysmal distance between subjectivities.
{"title":"Distance, and Intimacy, and T. S. Eliot’s Self-Critical Laughter","authors":"Rachel Trousdale","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192895714.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192895714.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"Eliot’s humor frequently resembles the superiority-based models of Freud and Bergson. His humor in letters is often racist, misogynist, and homophobic. But he also uses laughter to examine failed communication and the limits of sympathy among reader, speaker, and subject. From depictions of laughing characters in Prufrock and Other Observations to the merriment in Old Possum’s Practical Cats, Eliot treats laughter itself, rather than the joke provoking it, as a form of communication conveying truths language cannot. Eliot’s laughter comes from doubt. His comedy is both superiority-based and empathic: amusement reminds Eliot of his own failures. Eliot’s self-conscious laughter becomes a unique vehicle for communication between artist and audience, if not between individuals. In The Waste Land, tragicomic moments teach readers to be skeptical of their own satirical impulses, and almost bridge the abysmal distance between subjectivities.","PeriodicalId":262367,"journal":{"name":"Humor, Empathy, and Community in Twentieth-Century American Poetry","volume":"84 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128619407","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-16DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192895714.003.0003
Rachel Trousdale
Marianne Moore treats humor as a way to recognize what we have in common with others and to create understanding across difference. In her early work, Moore experiments with combinations of satire and empathy. In “A Prize Bird” and “The Wood-Weasel,” she uses humor as a test of friendship, and suggests that sympathetic laughter constitutes a distinctively American approach to collaborative artistic creation. Humor in “The Pangolin,” like the artists’ tools Moore discusses in the poem, is an end in itself and a way to discover new possibilities: it marks shared humanity and unites the human with the divine. Moore’s laughter occurs when we understand intuitively what it is like to be someone else; the more apparently unlike us the other, the more satisfying the laughter. Throughout Moore’s work, humor can be read as an ars poetica, modeling the synthesis of diverse components that she performs in her poetry.
{"title":"“Humor Saves Steps”","authors":"Rachel Trousdale","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192895714.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192895714.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"Marianne Moore treats humor as a way to recognize what we have in common with others and to create understanding across difference. In her early work, Moore experiments with combinations of satire and empathy. In “A Prize Bird” and “The Wood-Weasel,” she uses humor as a test of friendship, and suggests that sympathetic laughter constitutes a distinctively American approach to collaborative artistic creation. Humor in “The Pangolin,” like the artists’ tools Moore discusses in the poem, is an end in itself and a way to discover new possibilities: it marks shared humanity and unites the human with the divine. Moore’s laughter occurs when we understand intuitively what it is like to be someone else; the more apparently unlike us the other, the more satisfying the laughter. Throughout Moore’s work, humor can be read as an ars poetica, modeling the synthesis of diverse components that she performs in her poetry.","PeriodicalId":262367,"journal":{"name":"Humor, Empathy, and Community in Twentieth-Century American Poetry","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134236002","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-16DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192895714.003.0005
Rachel Trousdale
Ezra Pound’s humor promotes unorthodox intimacies between readers and writers. His portraits in The Pisan Cantos catch Henry James and James Joyce laughing, emphasizing their human peculiarities and Pound’s personal knowledge of them. These scenes suggest how unsatisfactory he finds traditional notions of poetic immortality. Instead, his portraits of jesting writers make literary texts contain the artist as both heroic figure and human individual, doing the work of high art and personal interaction simultaneously. Pound loves the Romantic figure of the poet-hero, but his laughter emphasizes that artist’s fallible humanity, and highlights modernism’s concern with creating accurate models of imaginative sympathy. As Pound’s laughter becomes more intimate, however, it is also more troubling: humor in The Cantos seeks to enlist his reader not just in his poem but in his hierarchical vision of art and his fascist politics.
{"title":"“Shocked at my Levity”","authors":"Rachel Trousdale","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192895714.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192895714.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"Ezra Pound’s humor promotes unorthodox intimacies between readers and writers. His portraits in The Pisan Cantos catch Henry James and James Joyce laughing, emphasizing their human peculiarities and Pound’s personal knowledge of them. These scenes suggest how unsatisfactory he finds traditional notions of poetic immortality. Instead, his portraits of jesting writers make literary texts contain the artist as both heroic figure and human individual, doing the work of high art and personal interaction simultaneously. Pound loves the Romantic figure of the poet-hero, but his laughter emphasizes that artist’s fallible humanity, and highlights modernism’s concern with creating accurate models of imaginative sympathy. As Pound’s laughter becomes more intimate, however, it is also more troubling: humor in The Cantos seeks to enlist his reader not just in his poem but in his hierarchical vision of art and his fascist politics.","PeriodicalId":262367,"journal":{"name":"Humor, Empathy, and Community in Twentieth-Century American Poetry","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129874682","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-16DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192895714.003.0006
Rachel Trousdale
Brown’s sense of humor provides guiding principles for real-world action while making the Black tradition of private anti-racist laughter public. Brown examines the violence of traditional superiority humor in poems like “Sam Smiley,” in which Black laughter is silenced by lynching. Rather than simply rejecting such humor, Brown gives readers alternatives: his anti-hierarchical approach in the “Slim Greer” poems inverts Bergson’s logic, making humor a precondition for empathy. The partial resemblance we see between ourselves and the object of laughter can teach us to recognize our commonality even with our enemies. For Brown, the ethical underpinnings of art lie in artists’ awareness of contingency, complexity, and the subjectivities of unlike others. Empathic humor turns laughter from a zero-sum game to a game everyone can win by rejecting not just racism but hierarchical thinking as a whole. Brown shows how empathic laughter can reframe our knowledge of other people and upend the way we systematize that knowledge.
{"title":"Sterling Brown’s Laughter Out of Hell","authors":"Rachel Trousdale","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192895714.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192895714.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"Brown’s sense of humor provides guiding principles for real-world action while making the Black tradition of private anti-racist laughter public. Brown examines the violence of traditional superiority humor in poems like “Sam Smiley,” in which Black laughter is silenced by lynching. Rather than simply rejecting such humor, Brown gives readers alternatives: his anti-hierarchical approach in the “Slim Greer” poems inverts Bergson’s logic, making humor a precondition for empathy. The partial resemblance we see between ourselves and the object of laughter can teach us to recognize our commonality even with our enemies. For Brown, the ethical underpinnings of art lie in artists’ awareness of contingency, complexity, and the subjectivities of unlike others. Empathic humor turns laughter from a zero-sum game to a game everyone can win by rejecting not just racism but hierarchical thinking as a whole. Brown shows how empathic laughter can reframe our knowledge of other people and upend the way we systematize that knowledge.","PeriodicalId":262367,"journal":{"name":"Humor, Empathy, and Community in Twentieth-Century American Poetry","volume":"52 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130331338","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-16DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192895714.003.0007
Rachel Trousdale
Bishop’s poems experiment with combinations of empathy and judgment. Such combinations are possible because Bishop rejects the Bergsonian self/other dichotomy as the basis for humor. Bishop returns to a more Romantic model of intersubjectivity, suggesting that experience can be continuous between observer and observed, and her laughter marks that continuity. Bishop’s empathic humor is partial, however, because speculation about another’s interiority always misses something, and self-criticism often falls short of full self-awareness. Bishop suggests that for intersubjective insight to work, all subjects must participate. The “joking voice” in “One Art” shows how pain and joy, joker and audience, lover and beloved are mutually constitutive. But Bishop does not think communion lasts, and her jokes highlight the discontinuities they overcome. For Bishop, humor comes from the tension between empathy and distance, the partial nature of friendship, marking the moment of revelation and the inevitability of that moment’s passing.
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