(Ebook) In the Event of Laughter: Psychoanalysis, Literature and Comedy by Alfie Bown; Esther Rashkin; Mari Ruti; Peter L. Rudnytsky ISBN 9781501342622, 1501342622

(Ebook) In the Event of Laughter: Psychoanalysis, Literature and Comedy by Alfie Bown; Esther Rashkin; Mari Ruti; Peter L. Rudnytsky ISBN 9781501342622, 1501342622

Using Lacanian psychoanalysis, as well as its pre-history and afterlives,In the Event of Laughterargues for a new framework for discussing laughter. Responding to a tradition of 'comedy studies' that has been interested only in the causes of laughter (inwhywe laugh), it proposes a different relationship between laughter and causality. Ultimately it argues that laughter is both cause and effect, troubling chronological time and asking for a more nuanced way of conceiving the relationship between subjects and their laughter than existing theories have accounted for.Making this visible via psychoanalytic ideas of retroactivity, Alfie Bown explores how laughter – far from being a mere response to a stimulus – changes the relationship between the present, the past and the future. Bown investigates this hypothesis in relation to a range of comic texts from the 'history of laughter,' discussing Chaucer, Shakespeare, Kafka and Chaplin, as well as lesser-known but vital figures from the comic genre.