BUCH
Perspectives on Values
The Network of Satire and Humor, the Tragic and the Absurd, the Grotesque and the Monstrous, Play and Irony, Parody and the Comic Mode
American Studies – A Monograph Series, Bd. 323
2024
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Abstract
Delving deep into the structural and structuring intricacies of humor in British and American novels, this book presents a systematic theory that unravels humor's multifaceted nature. Humor’s forms are analyzed in pioneering novels in a wide range of genres including the 18th-century novel, naturalism, modernism, and postmodernist writing. Gerhard Hoffmann's insight transforms the conventional view of humor, positing it as dynamic force that shapes relationships within the Complexity of historical and cultural contingency. By scrutinizing humor’s form and function, a nuanced exploration of moral values emerges, revealing positions of incongruity and negation and the dissemination rather than containment of meaning. Humor becomes a network of perspectives transcending the text itself. This comprehensive exploration offers innovative readings of canonical authors such as Fielding, Twain, Woolf, Hawthorne, Melville, Wharton, Faulkner, and Barthelme.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
| Zwischenüberschrift | Seite | Aktion | Preis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cover | I | ||
| Title Page | IV | ||
| Imprint | V | ||
| Contents | VI | ||
| PREFACE | XVI | ||
| IN MEMORIAM: PROF. DR. GERHARD HOFFMANN (1931–2018) | XVIII | ||
| 1 PROBLEMS OF DEFINITION AND INTERRELATION | 1 | ||
| 1.1 The Comic Mode’s Double Structure: Target and Value Poles | 1 | ||
| 1.2 Satire and Humor as Network of Values | 3 | ||
| 1.3 The Interplay of Form and Content | 6 | ||
| 1.4 Satire as Mediator of Didacticism and Narrative | 7 | ||
| 1.5 The System of Humor | 8 | ||
| 1.6 The Chain of Incongruity Categories and Play of Meaning | 11 | ||
| 1.7 The Comic Perspective | 12 | ||
| 1.8 Satire versus Humor | 14 | ||
| 1.9 The Grotesque | 15 | ||
| 1.9.1 The Absurd | 16 | ||
| 1.9.2 Play | 17 | ||
| 1.9.3 Irony | 18 | ||
| 1.9.4 Parody | 20 | ||
| 1.10 The Satiric Stance | 21 | ||
| 1.11 Narrative and Satire | 25 | ||
| 1.12 Satire’s Targets: The Narrative Form of Hypocrisy, Sameness, and the “System” | 28 | ||
| 2 THE 18TH-CENTURY NOVEL: HUMOR AS SIGN OF GOOD NATURE | 35 | ||
| 3 THE MODEL CASE: COMIC VIEW, HUMOR, AND SATIRE IN CERVANTES’S ‚DON QUIXOTE‘ | 41 | ||
| 4 HUMOR AS PHILOSOPHICAL ATTITUDE | 47 | ||
| 5 THE RIVALRY BETWEEN HUMOR AND SATIRE AND THEIR EXHAUSTION IN THE NOVEL | 53 | ||
| 6 SATIRE, HUMOR, AND IRONY IN AMERICAN FICTION | 59 | ||
| 6.1 Satire and American Humor | 59 | ||
| 6.2 The Targets of Satire in American Fiction | 66 | ||
| 7 SATIRE AND UTOPIA: NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE’S ‚THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE‘ | 71 | ||
| 8 HERMAN MELVILLE: STRANGENESS, SATIRE, HUMOR, PLAY, IRONY, AND THE COMIC MODE | 75 | ||
| 8.1 The Curious, the Mysterious, and Satire as Substructure | 75 | ||
| 8.2 Experiments with Social and Cosmic Satire, Satire and Symbolic Method, Travel and Bildungsroman as Structures of Satire: ‚Mardi‘ and ‚White-Jacket‘ | 81 | ||
| 8.3 The Combination of Strangeness, Irony, Cosmic Satire, and the Post-Tragic Mode as Attitudes and Forms of Incongruity: ‚Moby-Dick‘ | 85 | ||
| 8.4 Social Satire and Parody, the Mystic Mode, and Cosmic Satire: ‚Pierre; or, The Ambiguities‘ | 94 | ||
| 8.5 Satire and the Attitudes of Play and Irony: ‚The Confidence-Man‘ | 102 | ||
| 9 MARK TWAIN: HUMOR, SATIRE, AND THE GROTESQUE | 113 | ||
| 9.1 Satire and Humor, Authenticity and Reality in the Novel | 113 | ||
| 9.2 Play, Pose, Irony of Form: ‚The Innocents Abroad‘, ‚Tom Sawyer‘, and ‚Life on the Mississippi‘ | 120 | ||
| 9.3 Satire and the Grotesque against Humor and the Comic Mode: ‚Huckleberry Finn‘ | 126 | ||
| 9.4 A Medley of the Fantastic, the Satiric, and the Grotesque: ‚A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court‘ | 130 | ||
| 10 REALISM AND NATURALISM AND SATIRE | 139 | ||
| 10.1 Realism, Time, Life | 139 | ||
| 10.1.1 Realism of the Ordinary: William Dean Howells | 141 | ||
| 10.1.2 Impressionism and Factualism: Hamlin Garland | 144 | ||
| 10.2 The Naturalist Novel: Satire and Universal Determinism | 145 | ||
| 10.2.1 Satire and the Existentialist View: Stephen Crane’s ‚The Red Badge of Courage‘ | 156 | ||
| 10.2.2 Satire and the Force of Nature: Frank Norris’s ‚The Octopus‘ | 158 | ||
| 10.3 The Mystery of the City, Multiperspectivity, Satire, and the Ambivalence of the Value Pole: Theodore Dreiser | 162 | ||
| 10.3.1 Satire and Mystery in the City Novel: ‚Sister Carrie‘ | 163 | ||
| 10.3.2 Satire in the Context of Personal Faults, Social Corruption, and Accidental Circumstances: ‚An American Tragedy‘ | 168 | ||
| 11 SATIRE AS AESTHETIC SYSTEM OF DIFFERENTIATION AND “CULTURE CONSCIOUSNESS”: HENRY JAMES | 173 | ||
| 12 EDITH WHARTON: STRATEGIES OF SATIRIC AND NARRATIVE IRONY AND THE RISE AND FALL MODEL | 183 | ||
| 12.1 Strategies of Satiric Fiction | 183 | ||
| 12.2 The Rise and Fall Model and the Values of the Past | 188 | ||
| 13 TOTAL SATIRE AND THE COMIC VIEW: SINCLAIR LEWIS AND ERNEST HEMINGWAY | 197 | ||
| 13.1 Sinclair Lewis’s ‚Babbitt‘ | 197 | ||
| 13.2 Ernest Hemingway: Satire, Existentialism, the “Boundary Situation,” and Purification of Language | 202 | ||
| 14 THE THIRTIES: IDEOLOGY, DOCUMENTATION, SATIRE, AND THE SELF’S LIBERATION FROM THE PRESSURES OF THE SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT | 205 | ||
| 15 TRUTH AND IDENTITY INSTEAD OF MORAL RULES: STEPHEN SPENDER AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF SATIRE IN MODERNIST TEXTS | 211 | ||
| 16 THE AMERICAN NOVEL AFTER 1945: SATIRE AND THE MULTIPLICATION OF VIEWPOINTS | 215 | ||
| 16.1 The Novel of the 1950s and the 1960s: Mobility of Perspectives, No Satire without a Comic View | 215 | ||
| 16.2 The Comic View Wins out over Satire: Satire Turns upon “the immense mass of things, ideas, beliefs”— Saul Bellow’s Comic Novel of Education | 218 | ||
| 16.3 A Black Man’s Point of View and a Satiric View of the System: Ralph Ellison’s ‚Invisible Man‘ | 223 | ||
| 16.4 Feminist, Social, and Universal Satire: Mary McCarthy’s Criticism of Consciousness | 226 | ||
| 16.5 The Artificiality and Ideological Constructedness of Satire and the Body as Value Pole: Norman Mailer | 228 | ||
| 16.6 Play, Irony, Paradox, and the Satiric Mode | 233 | ||
| 17 POSTMODERNIST FICTION | 241 | ||
| 17.1 Multiperspectivism and Partiality of Satire | 241 | ||
| 17.2 Satire, Waste, and Paranoia | 245 | ||
| 17.3 Entropy, the Void, and Satire against the System | 254 | ||
| 17.4 Satire and the Labyrinth, Paranoia, and the Void | 257 | ||
| 17.5 Parody, Satire, Myth, and the Tragic View: John Barth’s ‚Giles Goat-Boy‘ | 266 | ||
| 18 THE TRAGIC VIEW IN FICTION | 277 | ||
| 18.1 Definitions and Conceptions | 277 | ||
| 18.2 The Nineteenth Century and Modernism | 280 | ||
| 18.3 The Postmodernist View | 284 | ||
| 19 THE ABSURD AS REDUCTION OF THE TRAGIC MODE | 293 | ||
| 19.1 The Concept of the Absurd | 293 | ||
| 19.2 Rebellion of Thought and Language Against Nothingness: Samuel Beckett’s ‚The Unnamable‘ | 296 | ||
| 19.3 Reduction of the Absurd in the Postmodernist Novel | 298 | ||
| 19.4 Design and Debris, Clarity and Paradox: Suicide in John Hawkes’s ‚Travesty‘ | 307 | ||
| 19.5 The Absurdity of the Absurd: John Barth’s “Night-Sea Journey” | 310 | ||
| 20 THE GROTESQUE AND THE MONSTROUS | 315 | ||
| 20.1 Definitions, Components, Ambiguities | 315 | ||
| 20.2 The Historic View | 325 | ||
| 20.2.1 Problem Zones and Variations of Forms | 325 | ||
| 20.2.2 The Development of Grotesque Deformation out of the Disorientation Pole: Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” | 330 | ||
| 20.2.3 The Grotesque and the Absurd: Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” | 334 | ||
| 20.2.4 Grotesque Laughter | 339 | ||
| 20.2.5 The Modernist Novel | 343 | ||
| 20.2.6 The Grotesque Ideal of Love in the “Grotesque Reality” of a “Wasteland” Society: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‚The Great Gatsby‘ | 350 | ||
| 20.2.7 The Grotesque as Demonic Force of the City and as Mysterious Life Principle: John Dos Passos’s ‚Manhattan Transfer‘ | 353 | ||
| 20.2.8 The Heroic Grotesque, the Mental, Faustian Grotesque, History as Grotesque Force, the Grotesque Form, and their Ironic Interrelation: William Faulkner’s ‚Absalom, Absalom‘ | 357 | ||
| 20.2.9 The Grotesque as Station to the Mysticism of Religious Experience: Flannery O’Connor’s ‚The Violent Bear It Away‘ | 363 | ||
| 20.3 The Postmodernist Grotesque: Its Radicalization in Terms of the Monstrous and its Attenuation by Play, Irony, and the Comic Mode | 366 | ||
| 20.3.1 The Monstrous “National State of Mind”: Nathanael West’s ‚The Day of the Locust‘ | 369 | ||
| 20.3.2 The Monstrous Excess of Violence: Jerzy Kosinski’s ‚The Painted Bird‘ | 373 | ||
| 20.3.3 The Monstrous, the Failure of the Comic Mode, and the Postmodernist Excess of Distance: John Hawkes’s ‚The Cannibal‘ | 375 | ||
| 20.3.4 The Satiric and the Playful Grotesque: Joseph Heller’s ‚Catch-22‘ | 381 | ||
| 20.3.5 Levels of the Grotesque and the Playful Grotesque: Kurt Vonnegut’s ‚Slaughterhouse-Five‘ | 387 | ||
| 20.4 The Mystery Factor of the Grotesque and the Grotesque as Ontological Enigma: Robert Coover’s ‚John’s Wife‘ | 391 | ||
| 20.5 The New Realism of the Post-Postmodernist Novel: The Grotesque Social Condition, and “‚the‘ mystery” | 399 | ||
| 21 THE MODALITY OF PLAY | 411 | ||
| 21.1 Conceptions and Contexts | 413 | ||
| 21.2 Fourteen Theses: Human Play and Play of the World | 416 | ||
| 21.3 Play, Text, and Art | 418 | ||
| 21.4 Limits of Play | 430 | ||
| 21.5 Play, the Comic Mode, and Humor in the Traditional Novel | 435 | ||
| 21.5.1 The Novel as Play: Miguel de Cervantes’s ‚Don Quixote‘ | 435 | ||
| 21.5.2 Playful Humor in the English Novel of the Eighteenth and Nineteeth Centuries | 438 | ||
| 21.5.3 Play with Oddities: Laurence Sterne’s ‚Tristram Shandy‘ | 439 | ||
| 21.5.4 Play Along the Way: Henry Fielding’s ‚Tom Jones‘ | 441 | ||
| 21.5.5 The Freedom of Play and the Unifying Power of Humor: Charles Dickens’s ‚Pickwick Papers‘ | 443 | ||
| 21.6 Playing Around Strangeness and Mystery in the American Novel: Herman Melville and Mark Twain | 445 | ||
| 21.6.1 Playing Around with Language as Reality Principle: ‚Moby-Dick‘ and ‚The Confidence-Man‘ | 447 | ||
| 21.6.2 Play versus Reality: ‚Tom Sawyer‘ and ‚A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court‘ | 452 | ||
| 21.7 Play in the Modernist Novel: Playing Around Things | 456 | ||
| 21.8 Psychological Play with Irony: Henry James’s ‚The Ambassadors‘ | 458 | ||
| 21.9 Play and Deconstruction of the Traditional Concepts of the Imagination: The Postmodernist Novel | 461 | ||
| 21.9.1 Playful Aesthetic Maximalism I: Play, Parody, and Possibility Thinking in John Barth | 466 | ||
| 21.9.2 Playful Aesthetic Maximalism II: The Multiplication of Viewpoints in Thomas Pynchon | 474 | ||
| 21.9.3 Playful “Minus Functions”: Minimalism, Chaos, and Boredom in Donald Barthelme, Richard Brautigan, Raymond Federman, and Ronald Sukenick | 480 | ||
| 21.9.4 Play, Irony, Parody, and the Comic Mode | 487 | ||
| 21.9.5 Strangeness, Mystery, and Freedom as Contexts of Play | 489 | ||
| 22 IRONY | 493 | ||
| 22.1 Introduction | 493 | ||
| 22.2 Irony of Subject Matter and Irony of Form | 494 | ||
| 22.3 Kierkegaard and the Attitude of Irony | 502 | ||
| 22.4 The Modernist Novel: Cosmic Irony and the Moment of Revelation | 506 | ||
| 22.4.1 Forms of Narrative Irony: Cosmic Irony | 508 | ||
| 22.4.2 Cosmic Irony in Herman Melville’s ‚Moby-Dick‘ versus the Modernist Nature Novel | 512 | ||
| 22.4.3 Natural Formations and Psychic Time: The Mythic View, the Symbolizing Method, and Joseph Conrad’s ‚Heart of Darkness‘ and ‚Nostromo‘ | 532 | ||
| 22.5 Irony Everywhere: ‚A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man‘ | 541 | ||
| 22.6 The Moment of Being and the Irony of Time: Viriginia Woolf’s ‚To the Lighthouse‘ | 547 | ||
| 22.7 The Sexual Act and the Moment of Being: D. H. Lawrence’s ‚The Rainbow and Women in Love‘ | 552 | ||
| 22.8 The Irony of Time | 560 | ||
| 22.8.1 James Joyce, ‚Ulysses‘ | 563 | ||
| 22.8.2 Virginia Woolf, ‚Mrs. Dalloway‘ | 564 | ||
| 22.8.3 Ernest Hemingway, ‚A Farewell to Arms‘ | 568 | ||
| 22.8.4 William Faulkner, ‚The Sound and the Fury‘ | 571 | ||
| 22.9 The Quest for Meaning and the Irony of Endings | 576 | ||
| 22.9.1 Henry James, ‚The Portrait of a Lady‘ | 577 | ||
| 22.9.2 Joseph Conrad, ‚Heart of Darkness‘ | 578 | ||
| 22.9.3 F. Scott Fitzgerald, ‚The Great Gatsby‘ | 580 | ||
| 22.9.4 Ernest Hemingway, ‚A Farewell to Arms‘ | 582 | ||
| 22.9.5 William Faulkner, ‚Absalom, Absalom‘ | 584 | ||
| 22.10 Postmodernist Irony | 591 | ||
| 22.11 Free Irony as Meta-Irony in Postmodernist Fiction | 594 | ||
| 22.12 Paradox as “the soul, source and principle” of Irony | 603 | ||
| 22.13 Irony of Structure and Character and Ironic Multiperspectivity: Thomas Pynchon’s ‚Gravity’s Rainbow‘ | 610 | ||
| 23 THE COMIC MODE | 625 | ||
| 23.1 Transformations of the Comic Mode in the English and American Novel: Contexts and Definitions | 625 | ||
| 23.2 Play, the Comic Mode, and Humor: The Picaresque Model, the Odd, and the Flat Character in the English Novel | 631 | ||
| 23.3 Satire and the Comic Mode in the Victorian Novel | 641 | ||
| 23.4 The Comical Satirist as Quasi-Nihilist: Becky Sharp in W. M. Thackeray’s ‚Vanity Fair‘ | 642 | ||
| 23.5 Satire and the Revised Comic Mode: George Meredith’s ‚The Egoist‘ | 644 | ||
| 24 THE MODERNIST COMIC MODE UNDER THE SWAY OF IRONY | 653 | ||
| 24.1 The Comic Mode as Paradox and Universal Theme: Henry James | 653 | ||
| 24.2 The Universal Comic View and “Free,” Life-Oriented Humor: William Faulkner’s ‚The Hamlet‘ | 659 | ||
| 25 THE POSTMODERNIST “FREE” COMIC MODE | 669 | ||
| 25.1 Play, Irony, Parody, and the Comic Mode in the Postmodernist Context | 670 | ||
| 25.2 The Author’s Voice: Chaos, Trash, Debris, and the Design of the Free Comic Mode | 675 | ||
| 26 PARODY AND PLAY | 697 | ||
| 26.1 Statements and Tendencies | 705 | ||
| 26.2 The Expansion of Parody as Structure of Existential Attitudes, Combinations with Play, Irony, Satire, and Comic Effects: Donald Barthelme | 709 | ||
| 26.3 Universal Parody, Imitation, and Transformation of Patterns: John Barth | 715 | ||
| 27 FREE HUMOR, FREE IRONY, FREE COMIC VIEW: THEIR CONTRIBUTION TO A NEW SENSE OF COMPLETION | 729 | ||
| 28 SUMMING UP: FRAMES OF ARTICULATION AND THE PERSPECTIVES OF INCONGRUITY, THE ORDINARY AND THE EXTRAORDINARY, WHOLENESS AND DIFFERENTIATION, THE POSSIBLE AND THE IMPOSSIBLE | 735 | ||
| BIBLIOGRAPHY | 757 | ||
| Backcover | 813 |
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