Elaborate Joke Research Articles

The Infinite Noise by Lauren Shippen

Reviewed by: The Infinite Noise by Lauren Shippen Alaine Martaus Shippen, Lauren The Infinite Noise. Tor Teen, 2019 [336p] (The Bright Sessions) Trade ed. ISBN 978-1-250-29751-8 $17.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-1-250-29752-5 $9.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 9-12 When sixteen-year-old star football player Caleb Michaels develops an empath’s power to feel others’ emotions, his parents send him to see Dr. Bright, a therapist [End Page 39] who specializes in the treatment of Atypicals like Caleb. Caleb feels a connection with moody overachiever Adam Hayes, but Adam initially wonders if this sudden attention from the adorable, popular jock isn’t part of an elaborate joke. Soon unexpected friendship turns to even more unexpected love, but outside forces, including a shadowy agency that uses Atypicals for military experiments, gradually emerge to threaten this budding romance. Building on popular podcast The Bright Sessions, this cross-platform, dual-narrator novel offers up charming romance with hints of a broader science fiction–infused world. Familiarity with the podcast is in no way required, but readers acquainted with the source content will appreciate the occasional overlaps, which function more as Easter eggs than spoilers. Both narrators indulge in a fair bit of navel-gazing, but that only contributes to the story’s overall sincerity. A swift turn from sweetness to suspense near novel’s end may feel sudden for the uninitiated, but hints early on lay useful groundwork and plant seeds for planned sequels with other Bright Sessions characters. This is a perfect what’s next for fans of Rowell’s Carry On or Levithan’s Boy Meets Boy (BCCB 9/03). Copyright © 2019 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

A Re-Reading of the Gest of Robyn Hode

This paper re-examines the Gest of Robyn Hode. It is argued here that this is the oldest and most coherent of the Robin Hood ballads, composed about the second quarter or middle of the fourteenth century but first printed in the early sixteenth. It is a single composition turning on four visits to Robin Hood in his forest. Robin, it suggests, inhabits an alternative world with its own morality but which has elements of parody of an aristocratic household. He and his friends can enter this world: but his enemies cannot find it. It is argued that Robin and his men are not yeomen in the fifteenth-century sense of the word, but merely ‘good men’. Nor are they outlaws in a legal sense: they are out of society. The paper suggests that there is nothing in the Gest that a knightly audience would have found attractive - indeed, it represents a gentleman’s nightmare of falling - but attention is drawn to the merry men’s cult of physical strength and it is suggested that the Gest has elements of a soldier’s tale. The Gest is read here as a work of imagination if not actually an elaborate joke; some elements of the Gest were plainly impossible and were meant to amuse. Finally, a tentative suggestion is made as to when and why it was written.

Tragedy+time=comedy

When Tig Notaro opened her set at Largo, Louis CK’s comedy club, on Aug 3, 2012, with the lines “Good evening. Hello, I have cancer”, the audience reaction was mixed— some guff awed, others laughed nervously, while others fell silent— as they tried to determine whether Notaro was serious or simply setting up an elaborate joke. In her largely improvised routine, which was recorded live by CK and is available for download, Notaro describes, slowly, and with many pauses, the pain of biopsies—material miles away from her usual blend of the surreal and absurd. She goes on to explain that her diagnosis of bilateral breast cancer followed a stay in hospital with a Clostridium diffi cile infection, breaking up with her partner, and the sudden death of her mother. None of this material should be remotely amusing, but somehow is very funny. Despite her opening lines, the comedy doesn’t come from the shock value of her diagnosis, but rather from discussion of the everyday minutiae of cancer: her friends won’t tell her if they’re having a bad day because it’s not going to be as bad as hers; what’s the point in buying food?; how will she date?; will she have to add “has cancer” to her online dating profi le? At times, Notaro speaks to the audience like a parent or doctor comforting a child—“Relax, everything’s fi ne. Are you doing better?”— in much the same way that her friends probably spoke to her after in the initial aftermath of her diagnosis. She tells the audience that she’s going to New York to work and get treatment and that everything will be fi ne. At times, realism creeps in and it sounds like she is no longer reassuring the audience but rather herself (“It’s gonna be OK... [pause] it might not be. You [the audience] are going to be OK though”). Within 3 months, Tig Notaro: Live (pronounced, signifi cantly, to rhyme with “give”) had been downloaded 75 000 times. Notaro’s cancer is in remission, and she has signed a book deal and is writing a sketch show for Comedy Central. Notaro says that the art of comedy is tragedy plus time, but that she is “just at tragedy right now”. However, judging by the audience reaction at the end of the set, she’s defi nitely at comedy, too .

Murakami, the Inklings, and the Uses of Fantasy

ABSTRACT This article explores the use of the acronym INKlings in Haruki Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, which I argue is a reference to J. R. R. Tolkien and his circle. I argue that these correspondences are not just an elaborate joke, but a device Murakami uses to explore many of the same themes as Tolkien, such as the uses of fantasy, the degree to which resistance to modern and postmodern society is possible, and the degree to which free will is possible.

The Thoreau You Don't Know: What the Prophet of Environmentalism Really Meant

The journalist and nature writer Robert Sullivan's homage to Thoreau is structured like a biography but devoted to an apologia. Those of us who first read Thoreau in the late 1960s—when his anarchistic social criticism resonated with the anti-war and early environmentalist movements—might wonder why a defense of Thoreau is needed. But recent ecocriticism has raised strong objections to Thoreau's seemingly masculinist, individualistic, sometimes racist, and often mystifying transcendentalism. Coupled with the distaste of more conventional undergraduates for Thoreau's seeming grumpiness about ordinary people just trying to make a living, this critical trend represents a serious threat to Thoreau's security as a canonical American author. Sullivan argues that Thoreau has been misunderstood, mainly by readers who know him through anthology excerpts from Walden and the essay on civil disobedience, which reinforce the view of Thoreau as a self-righteous crank with a nastily misanthropic streak. Sullivan's position is that, far from being a dreamy romantic, Thoreau was practical and, in the crisis economy of mid-nineteenth-century America, hard-put to make a living through the family pencil business, free-lance writing, and surveying. Far from being a sulky loner and forerunner of the macho tradition of anti-social nature writing, he was a good son and devoted brother, a fun-loving townsman who played the flute and loved to dance. The experiment at Walden Pond, far from having the pretence of a wilderness experience, was Thoreau's version of alternative Utopianism that was all the rage in his day; the house itself not a cabin in the wild but a logical, if exaggerated, nod toward the simplicity favored by the best-known architects of the times. Much of the Walden experiment—even the bean patch that Thoreau managed to cultivate at a slight profit—was an elaborate joke, issuing from Thoreau's favorite tropes: hyperbole and ironic inversion. In his lectures at the Concord Lyceum, he was seen as a humorist, as he often softened his social criticism with verbal wit and gentle irony. Sullivan rightly points out that humor has a short shelf life, and without some historical contextualization, we may miss much of what was funniest in Thoreau.

Alan of Lille's <i>Anticlaudianus</i> as Intertext in Chaucer's <i>House of Fame</i>

Alan of Lille's Anticlaudianus as Intertext in Chaucer's House of Fame Sarah Powrie When scholars consider Alan of Lille's influence on Chaucer's works, they often point to the goddess Nature in the Parliament of Fowls. Much like the goddess that Alan depicts in his Complaint of Nature, Chaucer's Nature in the Parliament is "the vicaire of the almyghty Lord" (379) who is responsible for ensuring the continuity of species and preserving concord in the created order.1 As Chaucer introduces the lady Nature, he acknowledges Alan (316), indicating that the goddess is making a guest appearance in his English dream vision. This literary gesture prompted George Economou to assert that it would be "impossible or foolhardy" to study the Parliament without consideringthis twelfth-century source.2 [End Page 246] Chaucer also acknowledges Alan of Lille in his House of Fame. Clutched in the talons of a squawking eagle, the narrator "Geffrey" compares his own sublunary excursion to the Neoplatonic ascent of the soul featured in Alan's Anticlaudianus (986). In this case, the reference to Alan appears calculated to distance Chaucer's comic flight from the philosophical quest for truth found in the twelfth-century allegory. Chaucer's turbulent journey guided by a garrulous eagle is most often interpreted to be an elaborate joke parodying such lofty aspirations.3 The playful spirit of the House of Fame distinguishes it from the Anticlaudianus; yet, this difference has in fact concealed the remarkable number of shared concerns uniting the two works. Each text is self-consciously literary, considering the operation of language, the nature of literary production, and the struggle for hermeneutical control. Each narrative is a semiotic experiment that creatively plays with paradoxes and equivocations in order to test language as a container of meaning or a maze of polyvalent potential. Each author self-identifies with the journey undertaken by the protagonist. Each work investigates the sources of literary authority and anticipates its own reception among an imaged readership. Not only do both texts muse on these literary concerns; the sequence of their interrogations unfolds following the same logic and order. The House of Fame introduces its hero Geffrey reflecting on the Aeneid, which the poem represents in an ekphrasis. Departing from the structural confines of this tradition, the hero flies into the uncharted skies of a vernacular philosophical epic, in which he investigates the structure of language and the origins of [End Page 247] narrative. Likewise, Alan's Anticlaudianus begins with an ambivalent homage to the Latin literary tradition represented in ekphrasis. Nature commissions Prudence with a metaphysical journey leading her into the supercelestial reaches to witness the divine artificer engaged in creative activity. Prudence's intellectual quest tests the borders of thought and expression, and its metaphysical/metapoetic quality shares much with Geffrey's investigation of natural and literary causes. Finally, each narrative concludes with a reflection upon the forces of Fortune or Fame, and so implicitly looks toward its own literary afterlife. Though parallel in narrative structure, the poems are philosophically opposed, issuing different statements about the operation of narrative and hermeneutical authority. Arguably, Chaucer was intrigued by the allegory's self-reflective quality but skeptical of its poetic theory. Alan claims to create a transcendent poetics that will uplift the reader morally and spiritually. In making these claims, Alan establishes himself as a theological or vatic authority with hermeneutical control over his text. In the House of Fame Chaucer initiates a dialogue with Alan's text, challenging not only its spiritual aspirations but its assertion of authorial control over textual meaning. By redirecting the allegorical journey of the mind to the House of Fame, Chaucer asserts that poetry speaks of culture, not of divine truth. It is within the context of an interpreting community that a text achieves its creative fruition, not within the abstracted space of the author's mental designs. The House of Fame represents Chaucer's literary reformulation of Alan's Anticlaudianus, in which Chaucer issues his own statement about the nature of literary production and hermeneutical authority.4 Given that the Anticlaudianus is less familiar to most audiences and that my own interpretation differs from standard accounts, a...

The Supernatural in Manfred

The text of Manfred is introduced with an epigraph consisting of Hamlet's famous words: 'There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.'1 Duncan Wu annotates this with the remark that the epigraph underlines Byron's belief in the supernatural and metaphysical at the time of composing the dramatic poem.2 This, however, is to take Byron at his word-an unwise thing to do in the case of a man who was renowned for his bams. If by 'belief in the metaphysical' is meant belief in God and at least a serious interest in the theory of the One Life, this part of Wu's note is unexceptionable, since two of the Alpine stanzas in the third canto of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (stanzas 89 and 90) show such a belief and such an interest. But if 'Byron's belief in the supernatural' means a belief in such beings as the spirits, the Witch, Nemesis and Arimanes, who appear in Manfred, one has to murmur that Byron wrote during the Regency and not in the reign of James VI. The Enlightenment had banished demonology. Belief in the supernatural had degenerated to such an extent that Burns could make it the subject of an elaborate joke in 'Tam O'Shanter.' Surely, a rational reader thinks, Tam's vision of witches dancing in a haunted church, to bagpipe music played by the devil in the shape of a black dog, is the hallucination of a drunken man. But the moral of the poem warns us, when tempted by drink or cutty sarks, to remember Tam's mare, whose tail was pulled off by the foremost witch in pursuit of the frightened hero. Go to the stable and you will see that the mare has lost her tail. How could that have happened if this was not a 'tale o' truth'?3 In the 1817 edition of 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' Coleridge included a marginal gloss supposed to have been written by a seventeenth-century demonologist. This complicates our interpretation of the poem, and has inclined some readers to think that they should willingly suspend their disbelief in supernatural spirits. But readers of the nineteenth century and later should give no more credence to the words of a demonologist than to those of a superstitious sailor of the sixteenth century. In recent years psychological explanations have been offered of the Mariner's supposed supernatural experiences. Richard Matlak has pointed out that according to the Mariner's own narrative he alone saw the spectre-bark, even though he drew his shipmates' attention to it and he says it came alongside.4 Besides having this hallucination, the Mariner converts dreams into supposed facts. He first heard of a submarine spirit when his shipmates recounted their dreams (131-34), but later he narrates that that spirit propelled the ship from a depth of nine fathoms, as though this was a fact (377-80). By making this claim about something of which he can have no knowledge, the Mariner casts doubt on the rest of his tale. He says of his dead shipmates, lying on a rotting deck, 'Nor rot nor reek did they' (254).5 This can only mean that they were not actually dead. They had probably collapsed through dehydration, and were revived by the rainstorm, when the superstitious Mariner thought that their bodies were animated by 'a troop of spirits blest' (349). Indeed he later describes the supposedly dead men standing together on the deck (433-35). This inclines a rational reader to think that the seraphband, who are said to have stood on the corpses and waved their hands (488-95), must have been another hallucination. But the seraphic signals were also seen by the Pilot and the Hermit in the skiff (523-27), and it would be over-ingenious to argue that the shipmates themselves must have been signalling with lights, since the Hermit says, 'they answered not our cheer!' (528). So a rational interpretation of the uncanny appearances in the poem is confounded even as a supernatural interpretation is undermined. Coleridge does in a serious way what Burns does in a comic one: both poets in their masterpieces play with our uncertainty about the extent of the credulity that we should allow ourselves in reading poems of the supernatural. …

Kierkegaard and What we Mean by 'Philosophy'

Against influential views to the contrary, notably formulated in Henry Allison's 'Christianity and Nonsense', it is argued that Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript is not in itself, as a whole or in any part, an elaborate joke. The work contains a serious though negative argument designed to locate the place of faith in relation to reason. Given that the text itself makes claims on our reason in this way but that its pseudonymous author is a self-styled humorist, the question of where the work's humour lies needs to be freshly confronted. After humour has been distinguished from comedy (as a point of view from which unconscious comedy in the enactment of life-views becomes visible), and both from absurdity, it is concluded that a fundamental aim of Postscript, once the negative argument has been given, is to cast light self-referentially on the comedy of humour itself. Finally, in asking what bearing Postscript's humour can have on whatever philosophy means to us today, two main respects (and areas) are indicated in which current philosophical investigation may be seen to be potentially comic from a (broadened and non-parochial) Postscriptian perspective.

Loose end

Loose end

Deflating the Odes: Horace, Epistles 1.20

Epistles 1.20, the last poem of its book, begins with an elaborate joke on the entry of Horace's book of epistles into the world and ends with a well-known σϕραγίς describing the poet himself. It will be argued here that this final poem recalls and subverts the pretensions of two earlier final poems in Horace's own Odes, and that its good-humoured depreciation of Horace himself is matched by a similar attitude towards his previous grand poetic claims as a lyric vates.

Rape versus Mans/laughter: Hitchcock'sBlackmailand Feminist Interpretation

In film studies the work of Alfred Hitchcock has often been considered misogynist, and feminist critics have assumed that the female spectator can enjoy the films only by adopting the position of a masochist or the perspective of a man. An analysis ofBlackmail, however, reveals that women's relation to the text is much more complicated than has generally been supposed. The film is constructed as an elaborate joke on the heroine, who, as in the Freudian paradigm, is ultimately transformed into an object between two male subjects; nevertheless, because much of the film stresses her subjectivity, a reading that insists on woman's point of view and experience becomes possible. This reading, which activates the wordrape—a term seldom used in analytical discussions of the film's central episode—has serious implications for feminist critics in their struggle for interpretive truth.

"El sabio Cide Hamete Venengeli"

Even to-day—when the vogue of the romances of chivalry has long since faded—the reader of Don Quixote can delight in Cervantes' felicitous invention of the novel's fictitious author, Cide Hamete Benengeli. It is, however, legitimate to ask whether Cervantes' elaborate joke is appreciated to the full. The aim of this short paper is to investigate how Cervantes came to choose his imaginary chronicler's Arabic style and names, and to suggest that these may have a hitherto unsuspected significance.