Comic Mode Research Articles

A dark ecology of comedy: environmental cartoons, Jo Shapcott's Mad Cow poems and the motivational function of the comic mode

Pursuing the ‘undigested’ principle in Timothy Morton's ‘The Dark Ecology of Elegy’, this essay will argue that the comic mode, despite seemingly being an opposing mode to Morton's, can produce similar results under the disarming camouflage of humour. To support such a case this essay will explore a range of material: from cartoons on the subject of pollution and climate change to Jo Shapcott's Mad Cow poems that concern the BSE crisis. Approaching such diversity, John Morreall's theories of humour will be applied in order to understand the structures and effects relevant to particular examples of comedy. Whilst this will reveal that an environmental comic mode is replete with Morton's same melancholy, the same ‘black bile’, there will be a departure from Morton's argument by revealing how the comic mode – in its ability to prompt self-identification and self-critique – can offer a corrective function for destructive environmental attitudes.

Exorcism, or the Road Not Taken

<i>Exorcism</i>, or the Road Not Taken

The comic mode in English literature: from the Middle Ages to today

1. Introduction 2. Late Medieval i. The Second Shepherds' Play ii. Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales iii. Medwall, Fulgens and Lucrece 3. The Renaissance i. Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream ii. Falstaff iii. Donne, 'The Flea' iv. Marvell, 'The Garden' 4. The Restoration and Eighteenth Century i. Restoration Comedy ii. Pope, 'The Rape of the Lock' iii. The Vogue of Sentiment iv. Sterne, Tristram Shandy 5. Nineteenth Century i. Austen, Emma ii. Dickens, The Pickwick Papers iii. Poking Fun at the Establishment iv. Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest v. Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat 6. Twentieth Century i. George Bernard Shaw ii. Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm iii. Beckett, Waiting for Godot iv. Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim v. Malcolm Bradbury, The History Man vi. Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones's Diary Bibliography Index.

‘If we cannot laugh like that, then how can we laugh?’: The ‘problem’ of Stalinist film comedy

ABSTRACTThe debates surrounding Konstantin Iudin's two pre-war comedies starring Valentina Serova — A Girl with Character (1939) and Hearts of Four (1941) — and Boris Barnet's The Old Jockey (1940) indicate that Soviet comedy had reached a dead end by the beginning of the 1940s. The Stalin-era film industry was acutely aware of the dangers of failing to tackle the lack of comedies on the Soviet screen, yet its attempts to develop the genre were persistently hindered by a distrust of comic play. Reading comedy through the lens of psychoanalytic theory, this article explores why fully harnessing the genre to the ideological task of bolstering social norms and fostering a sense of coherent selfhood proved impossible. Shedding light on the growing contemporary anxiety over laughter as ‘an end in itself’, I trace the changing conception of appropriate forms of Soviet comedy and the affects it elicited after the advent of the ‘guiding line’ of socialist realism. Called to deploy laughter as a means of shaping patterns of desired behaviour, film-makers stepped away from the comic mode's enactment of discordance and incongruity in preference for ego-affirming humour. The new paradigm of realistic comedy purged from the ‘excess’ of comic devices, however, could not satisfy the expectations placed on the genre by Soviet audiences.

Why Did Steele’s The Lying Lover Fail? Or, The Dangers of Sentimentalism in the Comic Reform Scene

Sometimes theatrical failures can be as instructive about nuances of genre as stage successes. Especially, a flop from a successful and culturally mainstream dramatist, such as Richard Steele, can tell us much about interactions between representational strategies, audience response, and effective fulfillment of generic aims. (1) In The Lying Lover (1703), Steele began with a clear aim, honest Ambition as he calls it, to write a that might be no improper Entertainment in a Christian Commonwealth. (2) Apparently much impressed by Jeremy Collier's campaign against the Immorality of the Stage, Steele says, [I] took it into my head to write a Comedy with the Severity he required. (3) His goal of writing a rigorously moral shapes both the plot and the comic style of his second play. The Lying Lover is plotted around the repentance and reform of a flawed protagonist, the imprudent braggart, Young Bookwit. The comic reform plot, which has been seen as one manifestation of the general moralization of the early eighteenth-century stage, was becoming quite popular at the turn of the century. In the early eighteenth century, playwrights brought to the London stage protagonists with a variety of flaws so that the audience could enjoy the spectacle of their remorse and reclamation. (4) In these reform comedies, all kinds of errant individuals, from philandering husbands and spendthrift wives to jealous lovers and inveterate gamblers, were successfully reformed for the entertainment of the audience. The Lying Lover exemplifies this generic trend, but it also introduces another innovative element in its comic matrix--an intensely tearful and pathetic last act. The high-pitched emotionalism and pathos of The Lying Lover's ending has led some critics to call it one of the first comedies. (5) While there is little current critical consensus about what sentimental comedy is, or if it can even be identified as a distinct dramatic genre, there is little dispute about the fact that the eighteenth century witnessed new important ways of valuing feeling, which appear as a loose but clearly identifiable cluster of qualities in literary sentimentalism. Elements such as sympathy for the distressed, tearful response to spectacles of suffering or tenderness, and instinctive emotional or monetary benevolence, are the basic marks of the mode and can indeed be detected in the last act of Steele's play. (6) These elements of sentimentalism--whether they make The Lying Lover a or not--play a particularly interesting role in Steele's failed because they seem to weaken the logic of his reform plot. The incompatibility between and reform modes, revealed in a consideration of The Lying Lover's failure, has consequences for the conventional narrative about early eighteenth-century comedy. Often, reform comedies are seen as merely one manifestation of the early eighteenth-century sentimentalization of comedy. (7) One source of this confusion of genres is that both reform and modes have an overt moral design on the audience, with an aim to move the audience to reassess themselves and society. However, a consideration of The Lying Lover's failure reveals that in spite of their shared express aim of improving their viewers, the mechanisms of affect underlying dramatic sentimentalism are not only distinct from those of reform but can be downright detrimental to its effectiveness on the stage. Steele's early fails because, along with its other flaws, it welds together two emergent but not always compatible comic modes--the and the reform mode. The case of The Lying Lover suggests that the common practice of subsuming reform under the aegis of early eighteenth-century sentimentalism needs to be reviewed and revised. Sentimental emotionalism, far from being easily conflated with the reform mode, can actually interfere with its aims and affects. …

Mel Brooks Meets Kenneth Burke (and Mikhail Bakhtin): Comedy and Burlesque in Satiric Film

I SHOWED MEL BROOKS'S 1968 FILM THE PRODUCERS to a group of students once and asked them what they thought was being satirically critiqued.1 When I asked students what they thought of criticism in film, resounding response I received was that there was none. The students insisted that film is just and that Springtime for Hitler sequence is present only for shock value. Shock value in film is a common phenomenon (e.g., Dumb and Dumber [1994], There's Something about Mary [1998], Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan [2006]), and students might be forgiven for assessing Springtime for Hitler as such. However, if The Producers is just entertainment, as students argued, and Springtime for Hitler sequence is simply meant to be funny, then at best, laughing at Nazis' flaunting of their power misses point, and at worst, it is potentially anti-Semitic. My anecdotal example points to importance of audience's ability to recognize and assess satiric criticism in film and television. As Naomi Rockier notes in her study on student responses to The Lion King (1994), audiences tend to view film as just entertainment, not to be taken seriously (6). Humorous films (comedies) can potentially compound this problem because affective nature of such films can discourage audiences from looking beyond laughter. However, looking beyond laughter is crucial in satiric films because of their potential to be misread and further hegemony (see, for example, Vidmar and Rokeach; Cooks and Orbe). Audiences need to understand not only that something is acting satirically but also how it is operating, if they are to understand satiric message and how satirist is welding his or her power. In other words, audiences need to do more than laugh at outrageous antics of Sacha Baron Cohen in Borat; they also need to understand how he is presenting his subjects of criticism and whether his presentation simply invites ridicule or calls for rehabilitation of these subjects. Failing to understand this and instead reducing such actions to merely entertainment can at best result in nonaction, a reinforcement of social problems as individual faults rather than systemic ones, or, at worst, a reifying of racist, sexist, classist, heterosexist, or otherwise hegemonic ideas. Kenneth Burke's poetic categories and, to a lesser extent, Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of carnival can be used to explore two different modes of satiric discourse- humorous critical discourse that seeks to specifically criticize a person or social norm- in film. Satiric discourse can function as punitive and unsympathetic, and when it does, it fits description of Burke's poetic category of burlesque, a frame of rejection that makes no attempt to get inside psyche of his [sic] victim and selects the externals of behavior, driving them to a 'logical conclusion' that becomes their 'reduction to absurdity' (54). However, satiric discourse can also operate through Burke's poetic category of comedy, a frame of acceptance that warns against dangers of pride, but its emphasis shifts from crime to stupidity (41). These films also display attributes of Bakhtin's carnivalesque (10); because carnivalesque texts direct laughter at all participants and flatten hierarchies (10-11), it is necessary that they operate in comic mode. To explore this idea of satire-as-burlesque and satire-as-comedy, two films co-written and directed by Mel Brooks are examined here: Blazing Saddles (1974) and History of World, Parti (1981). Blazing Saddles is an exemplar of satire-as-comedy; that is, its satiric criticism operates though Burke's comic frame. History is an exemplar of satireas-burlesque, and its burlesque satiric criticism is different from comedie satiric criticism. Burke's poetic categories explicitly outline different modes of humor, and therefore they are ideally suited for understanding different modes of humorous critical discourse in film. …

The Offices Of Comedy

THE OFFICES OF COMEDY Alenka Zupancic, The Odd One In: On Comedy, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 2008, 230pp; £14.95 paperback Slavoj Zizek is effusive in his praise of this book and it is easy to see why. The Odd One In is a brilliant contribution to the theorising of comedy. Introducing her earlier book, Ethics of the Real, Zizek admitted that he was 'agape with envy and fury, feeling threatened in the very core of my philosopher's existence, awestruck by the sheer beauty and vigour of what I had just read'.1 He has even more cause to be threatened here. Like Mladen Dolar, the third principal member of the Slovenian Lacanian school, Alenka Zupancic lives in the shadow of Zizek's bravura performances and theoretical fireworks but in many respects she is his equal - her exposition of Lacan in Why psychoanalysis? is as profound as any of his - while in others she surpasses him - most notably in her superior understanding and consequently more just estimate of Deleuze. In the tradition of Jacques-Alain Miller - to whom the Slovenian Lacanians are so deeply indebted - her starting point is the lack in the Other: put at its simplest, the lack of the signifier which would enable self-completion. Frequently this notion is translated into, and thereby reduced to, the classic themes of existentialist philosophy: the human subject alienated from society and separated from something oflife. Zupancic's thinking on what she terms 'the subject's unrepresented presence in the Real' (pi 67) is much more sophisticated. The lack is a gap which at one and the same time 'separates the subject from and links her to her enjoyment and/or symbolic function' (p20 1 ). In other words, there is always a gap between the subject and the signifier on which its existence depends: the gap inhabited by the notorious object a. Following the Lacan ?? Seminar XVII, Zupancic conceives this object as at once lack - insofar as the object a is the eternally missing object of desire - and excess: the subject, in its failure to attain the lost object, produces a surplus jouissance whose satisfactions disregard the subject's conscious wishes. On this basis Zupancic makes short work of the doxa that comedy reconciles us to our finitude. Man's finititele, she writes, is 'corroded' by 'desire in its radical negativity' (p52) and the drive with its generation of surplus jouissance. Consequently, '[not] are we not infinite, we are not even finite' (p53). And this is the source of comedy for, as Zupancic argues, 'If humans were only human(s)... there would be no comedy' (p49). This contradiction within finitude and its manifestation in a surplus jouissance - the plus-de-jouir - is apparent in a number of comic modes. For example, she discerns the plus-de-jouir operating in characters like Moliere's miser, Harpagon, whose mode of enjoyment is at odds with his ego. In such characters, she argues, the id obtains satisfactions whatever the stresses and misery experienced by the ego. Similarly she detects in the comedy situations which develop around a character and his double, the split between the subject and the signifier, and between the subject and its self-image. In such comedies, she claims, the redoubling, by introducing a surplus object, not ruptures the subject's imaginary unity but creates a short circuit between the heterogeneous elements within subjectivity which can neither unite nor separate. Thirdly in comedies of mistaken identities she argues that the comedy again arises from a troublesome surplus. As she astutely observes, whereas in thrillers the suspense arises from an impending cataclysm - the question is whether the hero will escape in time - in comedies the catastrophe has already occurred and the suspense arises from the question of how they will manage its effects, in particular the surplus object. Hence, in the prototype of this form of comic suspense, the question is not whether the husband will discover the proverbial lover in his wife's closet but rather 'what will happen after he does' (pp92-3). …

Alien Come Home: The Story of Daniel Defoe’s Missing Years, 1644–1680 by John Martin

228 for the world. In contrast to the openendedness of the larger narrative, Yorick himself comes to a sudden, definitive end, visually symbolized by the solid black page. And it is in the parson’s death—which ‘‘substitutes the theatrics of tender gestures to the discharge of satirical volleys’’—that Sterne arrives at the comic mode that will serve him for the rest of the novel. As skillful as Mr. Martinez is at drawing the ‘‘fine line’’ that separates the many comic terms in his title, the essay unconvincingly dismisses sentimentality. Avoiding ‘‘the acrid hostility of satire,’’ Mr. Martinez posits, without fully defending the claim, that ‘‘humour’’ should not ‘‘lapse into its antithesis and impose an emphasis on the heart.’’ But such a flaw does not undermine his central argument, and his essay deserves a place in the longraging debates over Tristram Shandy’s generic identity. This Shandean also contains two essays that are part of the ongoing enterprise of cataloguing and making sense of illustrations, prints, and decorative objects based on Sterne and his characters . Brigitte Friant-Kessler’s ‘‘Laughat -able Matter Re-ordered: Illustrated Sterne and Satirical Prints (I)’’ focuses on satirical appropriations of Sterne’s characters, including a series that depicts Charles Lennox, third Duke of Richmond, as Uncle Toby sitting in his privy-like sentry box after the defeat of his bill to fortify the dockyards in 1786, and such burlesques as ‘‘The Siege of Bergem op Zoom,’’ a Bunburyesque print that features Toby and Trim engaged in an indoor mock battle with broomsticks, a barking spaniel, and a precariously balanced musket connected by a string to Toby’s coat. W. B. Gerard and Brigitte Friant-Kessler’s ‘‘Towards a Catalogue of Illustrated Laurence Sterne: Decorative Arts,’’ the fourth of five installments, includes mass-produced items such as basalt teapots and silkworks, Wedgewood candlesticks and vases. By far the most frequently reproduced image here is a sentimental portrait of Maria with her dog Sylvio . These varied images will interest Sterneans and students of eighteenthcentury visual and material culture. Brian Michael Norton California State University, Fullerton JOHN MARTIN. Alien Come Home: The Story of Daniel Defoe’s Missing Years, 1644–1680. UK: Authors Online for Anglia Publishers, 2009. Pp. xiv ⫹ 97.£9.99; $15.95. Visitors to the website of Anglia Publishers are greeted with the jaunty invitation , ‘‘Publish with us at an affordable fee. Be promoted and marketed. Imagine . . . your name on the cover of your own attractive book.’’ That slogan fairly well tells the story of this self-published and self-referential book. It was not vetted by other Defoe scholars, nor does it appear to have benefitted from the services of an editor or proofreader. Of its 62 notes, a quarter refer either to Mr. Martin’s earlier (also self-published) book on Defoe (Beyond Belief, 2006) or to Defoe’s Early Life (1981) by Frank Bastian. Like Bastian, but far surpassing him in audacity, Mr. Martin draws inferences about Defoe’s early life from his works. If Defoe wrote Moll Flanders from the viewpoint of a woman who had committed incest, then he also must have been a homosexual who committed incest with his sister (do not ask). This sister, Mary Foe (but they both went by the name of King), bore him two chil- 229 dren, after which he accompanied William Penn on ‘‘a version of the Grand Tour’’ on which he killed a man in Paris, requiring him to conceal his identity when he returned to London, which is why we have no record of any of it. However, Defoe did use the adventure as the basis for Captain Singleton. William the Quaker/Penn bought Daniel/ Captain Bob’s silence by giving him a tract of land in America, where he lived with his sister for nine years, off and on, and was pursued by a young girl named Elizabeth White whom he had slept with, which provided him with the germ of Roxana. How did Defoe have time for all these escapades? Ah well, he was born not in 1660, as all previous biographers believed , but in 1644, based on parish records of the birth of a son to Daniel...

Chief Seattle's Speech Revisited

Chief Seattle's Speech Revisited Arnold Krupat (bio) I Indian orators have been saying good-bye for more than three hundred years. John Eliot's Dying Speeches of Several Indians (1685), as David Murray notes, inaugurates a long textual history in which "Indians . . . are most useful dying," or, as in a number of speeches, among them the one I will consider here, bidding the world farewell as they embrace an undesired but apparently inevitable exile or demise.1 Unlike traditional condolence oratory as, for example, performed by Iroquois and Tlingit people, these elegiac speeches are responses to specific occasions, usually demands for land; they have been addressed not so much to other Indians as to whites who have shown themselves keenly interested in preserving and circulating them. Whereas the speeches of dying Indians were useful in the seventeenth century for the purpose of advancing the gospel, by the eighteenth century, as Murray writes, "dying Indians offered comfort within a different frame of reference, that of inevitably doomed nobility. The focus, therefore changes from ordinary Indians to Indian leaders" to "chiefs" or, as J. B. Paterson insisted in his preface to Black Hawk's autobiography of 1833, to Native American "heroes." Murray goes on to show how, after the American Revolution, "in an increasingly bourgeois society," the "popularity of surrender . . . speeches by Indians" is "acted out [as] the renunciation of power by a nobility."2 By the mid-nineteenth century, this conflict of classes is largely overridden by the discourses of "scientific racism" and "manifest destiny."3 These discourses instantiate a national narrative of progress in the comic mode.4 "Noble" or not, the "savage," comically or, from his perspective, tragically, had to go. [End Page 192] These farewell speeches (those of Black Hawk, Cochise, Chief Joseph, and Chief Sealth), like the protest speeches referenced by Murray, are also "contextually over-determined," with the various contexts perceived very differently by whites and Indians producing an oratorical discourse of considerable complexity.5 II Chief Sealth or Seattle was born about 1786 at Old Man House, the winter village of his Suquamish (the name means "people of the sheltered salt water") nation, on Bainbridge Island in what is now Washington State.6 His father, Schweabe, was Suquamish, and his mother, Scholitza, was a Duwamish woman from the area of present-day Kent, Washington. Sealth is said to have attained chiefly status as a result of his initiative in defending his people against an attack from upriver tribes, the sort of career success expected at one time or another for a young man of his noble lineage.7 There are various monuments to him in Seattle and the state of Washington, but his national and international renown derives from a speech he is usually said to have given in 1854 or 1855. This speech was not published until October 29, 1887, when it appeared in the Seattle Sunday Star in a translation version by Dr. Henry A. Smith. It was reprinted a few years later in Frederic Grant's History of Seattle, Washington (1891), then reproduced in publications by Clarence Bagley and Roberta Frye Watt in 1931 and by John Rich in 1932. Bagley, Watt, and Rich all added a thirteen-word conclusion to the speech as it had originally been printed in 1887: "Dead did I say? There is no death, only a change of worlds."8 Sealth's speech was later "retranslated" "from the Victorian English of Dr. Henry Smith" by William Arrowsmith in 1969 and subsequently rewritten and expanded by Ted Perry in the early seventies for a film he had been commissioned to produce for the Southern Baptist Convention.9 The speech was once again altered for the Spokane Expo of 1974.10 It is only the 1887 text that is relevant to the present study.11 Sealth's speech, as I've noted, is frequently said to have been delivered either in 1854 or 1855 during meetings convened by Isaac Ingalls Stevens, the newly appointed governor of Washington Territory, with the aim of persuading the Puget Sound Indians to give up most of their lands in Kitsap County for a reservation at Port Madison. As the historian Carole Seeman...

Charles Burney and The Cunning-Man

Charles Burney and The Cunning-Man Elisabeth Le Guin It all starts in Naples before Charles Burney is even born. Opera is booming, and with it a host of auxiliary theatrical and musical practices. Comic theater is thriving; the composers of the day—Alessandro Scarlatti, Leonardo Leo, Leonardo Vinci, and a young fellow named Giovanni Pergolesi—produce full-length operas in Neapolitan dialect as well as droves of shorter comic works, intermezzi to be played between the acts of serious operas. It's as if the public cannot stand to be away too long from the mother wit, sarcasm, raunchiness, and latent social criticism of the comic mode that make it an uncomfortable business for official censors. Outside of the officially supported theaters, troupes of traveling players adopt and adapt these shorter works and take them on tour throughout Europe. One such group, under the guidance of Eustachio Bambini, comes to Paris in 1752 with an intermezzo by Pergolesi called La serva padrona (The Maid Made Mistress), which visits once again the old commedia trope of the sassy servant who tricks her master—in this case, into marrying her, thereby legitimizing her socially. The music, like that for all Neapolitan intermezzi, is deftly minimal: only a soprano and a bass singer, a mute actor, a couple of violins, and some supporting instruments are necessary to sketch the story in lively tones and acts. The Italian players and their music are appreciated in Paris, where the official opera tends toward ponderously magnificent tragedy, but they have been there for six months before their reception unleashes a controversy. All of a sudden, there are fights in opera houses; friendships are made and broken over the issue of the relative effectiveness of Italian and French musical styles. Everyone who can read and write—which in Paris at this time is a large number of people—gets in on the act, it seems; the storm of over sixty pamphlets that results is known as the Querelle des Bouffons, and it turns out to be one of the defining events in European musical history. Among the pamphleteers are most of the philosophes, and prominent among them is Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who is a composer as well (something he [End Page 113] would not like to be so generally forgotten as it is nowadays). He steps outside the fusillade of rhetoric long enough to write Le Devin du village (The Village Soothsayer), which resembles Serva in being deftly minimal: an intermezzo-length piece for three singers and a very small orchestra, and a plot that draws from ancient archetype, this time pastoral—a shepherd and shepherdess of low social station. They are lovers but each vaguely longs for something better, and they are persuaded by a "sorcerer" (whose main magic appears to be common sense) to accept their lot, and in so doing find happiness, which they celebrate by dancing. Le Devin is significantly different from Serva in its musical style, which is a conscious attempt to fuse the best of the French and Italian idioms, and thus a direct contribution to the ongoing Querelle. The little piece is a success. In fact, it is one of the roaring successes of the entire history of opera. It is mounted and remounted, adapted and readapted, hundreds of times between its 1753 premiere at the Opéra and its last performances there in 1829. News of such success tends to travel rapidly. Within a year of its premiere, Le Devin has been reworked as an opéra-comique, Les amours de Bastien et Bastienne, by Charles-Simon Favart, with a mixture of pirated popular and operatic airs as musical material. In 1770 a translation of Favart's libretto into German comes to the attention of the violinist and composer Leopold Mozart, who, ever mindful of keeping the career of his prodigy son Wolfgang up to the minute, arranges for the twelve-year-old to compose new music for it. Meanwhile in 1765 the English actor David Garrick, visiting Paris, has seen Le Devin and been much impressed; upon returning to London, he prevails upon his friend Charles Burney, then a composer for the theater and an aspiring man...

Middle Comedy and the "Satyric" Style

Although "Middle Comedy" may best serve as a chronological label, the remains of pre-Menandrian, fourth-century comic productions suggest that certain characteristics were more dominant at this time than in earlier or later periods of Greek comedy. The possible sources for these characteristics are wide-ranging, but available evidence indicates that fifth-century satyr drama was one of the most important. Not only do fragments, titles, and plots reveal a significant generic relationship, but Aristotle even seems to link their comic mode. Fifth-century satyr plays, I argue, functioned as an important model for the poets of Middle Comedy.

Rachel Fulton and Bruce W. Holsinger, eds, History in the Comic Mode: Medieval Communities and the Matter of Person. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2007. xiii+392 pp. $45.00 (cloth).

Rachel Fulton and Bruce W. Holsinger, eds, History in the Comic Mode: Medieval Communities and the Matter of Person. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2007. xiii+392 pp. $45.00 (cloth).

History in the Comic Mode: Medieval Communities and the Matter of Person – Edited by Rachel Fulton and Bruce W. Holsinger

History in the Comic Mode: Medieval Communities and the Matter of Person – Edited by Rachel Fulton and Bruce W. Holsinger

WINSLOW HOMER AND THE MECHANICS OF VISUAL DEADPAN

This essay argues for the central importance of the ‘gag’ to Winslow Homer's early paintings, made during the American Civil War. As his entrée into the New York art world in these years Homer creates a form of visual deadpan that spoke to the ‘comical and coffinly’ circumstances of the war, resonated with the methods of the period's controversial platform comedians, and answered the critical call for a ‘higher sort of humor’ that moved beyond the antics of the antebellum comic mode of the 1850s.

Re-reading B. S. Johnson by Philip Tew, Glyn White

MLR, 104.2, 2009 563 reviews as well as poetry, drama, and fiction, and managed to inject these genres with a recognizable style, vision, and voice that extend their narrow frame. For writers such as Dorothy Parker and Anita Loos, for instance, fashion captions and silent film scripts provided themwith early training in finding thewitty mot juste thatwould serve themwell when they tackled poetry and fiction. Hammill structures her book around case studies, and each chapter features one author and the major works (sometimes a single one) on which her fame and popularity rested at the time of publication. While women such asMae West and Margaret Kennedy may seem to belong to opposite universes on the surface, Hammill succeeds in foregrounding theways inwhich each author in her study developed a distinct literarypersona. Each section not only portrays the context fromwhich their texts emerged, it also documents the sometimes tumultuous or controversial reception of theworks and traces the impact of this reception on the authors subsequent efforts. While each chapter could be read separately according to one's interest in a particular figure, the cumulative effectof reading about these women and their struggle to achieve critical acceptance and respect despite their financial success highlights striking continuities between theirvarying experiences. At the same time,Hammill neatly draws the individual circumstances, style, and voice of each writer, and the fact thatmost of her authors wrote in comic modes (one-liners, satire, parody) provides her with a wealth of entertaining sources to analyse. Perhaps themost important effectof reading Hammill's study is the interest itgenerates for the sources themselves. Ifher book brings more readers to Loos's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes or Stella Gibbons's Cold Comfort Farm, for example, it would more than justify its publication. In and of itself,Women, Celebrity, and Literary Culture between theWars amply rewards both the common reader look ing for a glimpse into a fascinating period inwomen's literature and the scholar ofmodernity seeking new areas of research or simply confirmation that studying inter-war literaturebywomen is indeed aworthwhile and richly rewarding pursuit. University of Portland Genevieve Brassard Re-reading B. S. Johnson. Ed. by Philip Tew and Glyn White. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 2007. xviii+246 pp. ?50. ISBN 978-0-230-52492-7. In his prefatory essay to this new collection of essays on thework of B. S. Johnson, Jonathan Coe tells of finding a note in Johnson's papers for his last, unfinished trilogy,House Mother Normal. Apparently the worst possible outcome Johnson could imagine for thework was that 'some academic cuntwill produce a study on if (p. xvi)?a typical outburst from theman pithily described by one of his contempo raries as being continually wracked by self-certainties'. An awareness of its subject's would-have-been resistance to itsproject pervades this study of the late Johnson, his work, and the critical field that has latterly sprung up around him, and its edi tors acknowledge the book's own part in creating a field of Johnson 'studies'. This collection thus rather self-consciously takes on themantle of crowning a period of rediscovery ofhis work, one largely instigated byCoe's justlypraised 2004 biography 564 Reviews of Johnson, Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story ofB. S. Johnson (London: Picador). This rediscovery of his work is inseparable from the idea that Johnson is somehow more suited to our critical landscape than he was to his own: Johnson's work was un dervalued in his own era, for reasons the editors of this collection make clear: In the 1960s and 70s literary criticism, like the nation, was less diverse, lesswilling to countenance difference, and B. S. Johnson's work offered a strong challenge to this cultural hegemony (p. 4). As such, Johnson's reputation needed rescuing from the literary establishment that had sought tomarginalize him, a marginalization that came about in no small part because of his resistance to neat categorization, and because of his unrepentant, alienating refusal to compromise his experimentalism. The aim, then, is explicit: rereadings are needed of his work partly due to a desire to pay him the belated respect of taking him seriously, of repaying a debt that the critical establishment has long owed...

History in the Comic Mode: Medieval Communities and the Matter of Person ed. by Rachel Fulton, Bruce W. Holsinger (review)

History in the Comic Mode: Medieval Communities and the Matter of Person ed. by Rachel Fulton, Bruce W. Holsinger (review)

Christopher Marlowe: Poet &amp; Spy by Park Honan (review)

REVIEWS 286 his case is harmed by the lack of specific evidence that would connect religious activity and the kind of rising urban economies he is discussing. More purely theological is Anna Harrison’s reading of one of Bernard of Clairvaux’s sermons on sainthood in “‘If one member glories…’: Community between the Living and the Saintly Dead in Bernard of Clairvaux’s Sermons for the Feast of All Saints.” Of all the articles here, the most innovative is Anne L. Clark’s “Why All the Fuss About the Mind?” Here the author looks at the inferences made by some cognitive scientists about the nature of religious experience through an analysis of Elisabeth of Schönau’s visions, and she concludes that, despite the many insights they offer, the theories about “doctrinal” modes of religiosity during the Middle Ages are in need of revision. In the essay “Aspects of Blood Piety in a Late Medieval English Manuscript: London British Library Additional 37049,” Marlene Villalobos Hennessy discusses the shapes assumed by blood piety in a particular manuscript of Richard Rolle’s works. Hennessy does a fine job contextualizing the imagery of the manuscript’s text and illustrations. Nevertheless, her fascinating picture of the way in which blood piety captures the tensions between Christ’s status as both a fully corporeal human being and the spiritual Word of God is somewhat lost under the weight of cross-references. This is one case where I think the author might have profited from more space to work out her ideas. Another is Allison K. Frazier’s “Machiavelli, Trauma, and the Scandal of The Prince: An Essay in Speculative History.” Here Frazier reads The Prince in the context of Machiavelli ’s personal biography (his torture at the hands of his political opponents), and asks how the text relates to modern thinking about trauma. Unfortunately, Frazier never really engages with the weaknesses of trauma theory, and so the methodological remarks with which she ends her study ring rather hollow. The reader will not come away from History in the Comic Mode: Medieval Communities and the Matter of Person with a very changed view of questions of community and personhood in the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, judged on the merits of the fine work collected by Holsinger and Fulton, the book does make an excellent addition to medieval studies. THOMAS O’DONNELL, English, UCLA Park Honan, Christopher Marlowe: Poet & Spy (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press 2005) xv + 421 pp. Despite a relative dearth of concrete documentary evidence, biographies of Marlowe are hardly rare. Park Honan’s study follows hot on the heels of both Constance Brown Kuriyama’s Christopher Marlowe: A Renaissance Life (2002) and David Riggs’s The World of Christopher Marlowe (2004). Honan himself is no stranger to the art of biography having previously written accounts of the lives of Jane Austen, Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold and William Shakespeare . Unsurprisingly, then, Christopher Marlowe: Poet & Spy is a case of an experienced biographer turning his attention to well-ploughed fields in the hope of bringing some new life to old soil. In writing this book, Honan’s avowed aim is to “offer the facts of Marlowe’s life reliably … [within] an ongoing historical context” (2–3). Therefore, it stands to reason to suggest that the success of this biography partially depends on the extent to which the author transgresses the REVIEWS 287 boundaries of his own stated remit: a point worth keeping in mind. The book is divided into four sections and ten chapters, which follow the stages in Marlowe’s life periodically and chronologically. Honan’s account of Marlowe’s childhood years in Canterbury is vivid and lively. It successfully brings to life the tactile and sensory world in which he lived, paying close attention to objects, sights, smells, sounds, and—most of all—to the people that surrounded the young boy. From scant information about Marlowe’s father, John, Honan infers that he was “by turns affable or truculent” (26), depending on his level of intoxication. Similarly, from only two documents (a household inventory and a will) Honan paints a colorful and lifelike portrait of Marlowe’s mother, Katherine. He makes imaginative yet distinctly authoritative...

Henpecked Husbands, Unruly Wives, And Royal Authority In Lydgate's &lt;span xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:m="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" style="font-style:italic;"&gt;Mumming At Hertford&lt;/span&gt;

John Lydgate's Mumming at Hertford is a performance piece of some 250 lines in which a group of henpecked husbands appear before the king to complain of their shrewish wives. It is one of the shorter pieces in Lydgate's oeuvre and probably was not well known amongst his contem poraries since it survives only in a single manuscript.1 In spite of its brevity and obscurity, the piece has drawn considerable praise from modern Lydgate critics. In his 1970 book on Lydgate, Derek Pearsall calls it one of the poet's unexpected triumphs.2 Similarly, Walter F. Schirmer's 1961 study of Lydgate asserts that the Mumming at Hertford reveals a talent for humour and satire to which [Lydgate] all too rarely gave expression.3 The basis of these critics' approval is primarily aesthetic, consisting of admiration (and some surprise) at Lydgate's ability to create good comedy, an accomplishment they attribute to the influence of Chaucer.4 Recent years have seen a flowering of Lydgate studies and, once again, the Mumming at Hertford has emerged as an object of interest. In her 2005 book?the first full-length study of Lydgate to appear in twenty years?Maura Nolan credits the Mumming at Hertford with a serious artistic purpose, arguing that it is deeply concerned with the genres of tragedy and comedy. Like Pearsall and Schirmer, Nolan observes the piece's numerous debts to Chaucer. She, however, does not read these as a lesser light's imitation of a comic genius, but rather as markers by which Lydgate signals his critique of Chaucer's tragic and comic modes.5 In spite of critics' interest in the Mumming at Hertford, and in spite of the widespread recognition of its roots in gender comedy, no one has yet considered it carefully in the context of the medieval gender comedy tradition, which runs from the Old French fabliaux of the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, through Chaucer in the late fourteenth century, and into a variety of fifteenth-century English lyrics, performances, and tales. While scholars have noted Lydgate's debts to the genre, particularly to the gender comedy of Chaucer, they have not inquired into the particulars of

Rachel Fulton and Bruce W. Holsinger, eds., History in the Comic Mode: Medieval Communities and the Matter of Person. New York and Chichester, Eng.: Columbia University Press, 2007. Pp. xv, 392; black-and-white figures. $45.

Rachel Fulton and Bruce W. Holsinger, eds., History in the Comic Mode: Medieval Communities and the Matter of Person. New York and Chichester, Eng.: Columbia University Press, 2007. Pp. xv, 392; black-and-white figures. $45.

Combative capping in Aristophanic comedy

Beckett's verbal duel is reminiscent of Aristophanic routines between two characters in which the name of the game seems to be to cap the boast, threat or insult hurled by the opposing character. Several recent studies have pointed to the importance of capping to the character and meaning of Aristophanic comedy. Ian Ruffell shows that verbal routines in which a joke is elaborated and capped by another are integral to Aristophanes' comic mode. He has also argued that Old Comedy is partly constituted through a generic requirement that each play deploy an intertextual rhetoric of innovation in which the playwright parades the way in which he has ingeniously capped the plots, routines and conceits of a rival's previous offering. Derek Collins has demonstrated that some of the social and stylistic dynamics of Aristophanic stichomythic and antilabic capping routines have been misunderstood due to a lack of awareness that such routines are part-and-parcel of a wider, cross-generic tradition of performed verse capping. He also shows that this central mode of poetic competition in archaic, classical, Hellenistic and Roman imperial Greece can be usefully illuminated by ethnographic and anthropological comparisons.