James Caron
University of Hawaii at Manoa, English, Emeritus
- Literature, Modernist Literature (Literary Modernism), Humor, Laughter, Mark Twain, Humor/Satire, and 16 moreAmerican Realism, American Comic Tradition, English, Bildungsroman, Evolution Humor, Tall Tales, Silent Film, Clown, Slapstick, Charlie chaplin, Humour Studies, Comedy, Philosophy of Humor, Satire, Satire & Irony, and Humor Studiesedit
- My research centers on two broad areas. The first is American literature, especially from the late nineteenth century... moreMy research centers on two broad areas. The first is American literature, especially from the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Under this heading I have special interests in popular culture, comic writers in general and Mark Twain in particular, as well as Realist and Modernist novelists.The second broad area includes the tradition of comic forms of literature in the West as well as non-literary comic arts in a variety of cultural settings. This second interest has lead me beyond literary criticism and aesthetics to study what other disciplines--such as anthropology, psychology, sociology, and medicine--have to say about the phenomenon of laughter, its value to a social group as well as to an individual, and the various cultural practices and arts which express a comic attitude.edit
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This article introduces a second special issue on satire from Studies in American Humor. Satire has a long and (mostly) honorable place in the Western tradition of belles lettres. When Juvenal was writing in the first century AD, he... more
This article introduces a second special issue on satire from Studies in American Humor.
Satire has a long and (mostly) honorable place in the Western tradition of belles lettres. When Juvenal was writing in the first century AD, he spoke admiringly of his predecessors, Horace and Lucilius. Probably, the satirists of the twenty-first century AD would speak of Juvenal as their worthy ancestor for dispensing comic ridicule. His surviving satires are products of his middle and old age, and his fate was to be virtually unknown during his lifetime. The satirists examined in the articles presented in this issue are mostly well known, and some will certainly be logged as this age’s contribution to satire’s long tradition. Those comic writers provide a satiric critique of today’s zeitgeist that marks out vice and folly while implying the virtues of better behavior. Their satires create a laughable chronicle of the times and so are worthy of a sustained scrutiny.
Jonathan Rossing, An Ethics of Complicit Criticism for Postmodern Satire
Viveca E. Greene, “Deplorable” Satire: Alt-Right Memes, White Genocide Tweets, and Redpilling Normies
William Howell, Judgments, Corrections, and Audiences: Amy Schumer's Strategies for Narrowcast Satire
Rebecca Krefting, Hannah Gadsby: On the Limits of Satire
James Nixon, “You think I’m joking”: Examining the Weaponized Comedy of President Obama’s Stand-up Addresses at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner
Christopher Gilbert, Of Satire and Gordian Knots
Satire has a long and (mostly) honorable place in the Western tradition of belles lettres. When Juvenal was writing in the first century AD, he spoke admiringly of his predecessors, Horace and Lucilius. Probably, the satirists of the twenty-first century AD would speak of Juvenal as their worthy ancestor for dispensing comic ridicule. His surviving satires are products of his middle and old age, and his fate was to be virtually unknown during his lifetime. The satirists examined in the articles presented in this issue are mostly well known, and some will certainly be logged as this age’s contribution to satire’s long tradition. Those comic writers provide a satiric critique of today’s zeitgeist that marks out vice and folly while implying the virtues of better behavior. Their satires create a laughable chronicle of the times and so are worthy of a sustained scrutiny.
Jonathan Rossing, An Ethics of Complicit Criticism for Postmodern Satire
Viveca E. Greene, “Deplorable” Satire: Alt-Right Memes, White Genocide Tweets, and Redpilling Normies
William Howell, Judgments, Corrections, and Audiences: Amy Schumer's Strategies for Narrowcast Satire
Rebecca Krefting, Hannah Gadsby: On the Limits of Satire
James Nixon, “You think I’m joking”: Examining the Weaponized Comedy of President Obama’s Stand-up Addresses at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner
Christopher Gilbert, Of Satire and Gordian Knots
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The ubiquity of satire in contemporary American popular culture suggests an opening for contributing to theory about that particular kind of comic artefact. In addition to a sketch of the necessary elements for satire to appear, I offer... more
The ubiquity of satire in contemporary American popular culture
suggests an opening for contributing to theory about that particular
kind of comic artefact. In addition to a sketch of the necessary
elements for satire to appear, I offer some theoretical
remarks about the field of study—humor studies as it is usually
called, The Comic as I term the enterprise. Potential meanings of
comic laughter are explored in order to probe the nature of satire
and its reception by audiences and readers.
suggests an opening for contributing to theory about that particular
kind of comic artefact. In addition to a sketch of the necessary
elements for satire to appear, I offer some theoretical
remarks about the field of study—humor studies as it is usually
called, The Comic as I term the enterprise. Potential meanings of
comic laughter are explored in order to probe the nature of satire
and its reception by audiences and readers.
Research Interests:
This introduction for a special issue of “Studies in American Humor” considers the usefulness of the postmodern condition as a rubric for demarcating a poetics of contemporary American comic art forms that uses ridicule to enable critique... more
This introduction for a special issue of “Studies in American Humor” considers the usefulness of the postmodern condition as a rubric for demarcating a poetics of contemporary American comic art forms that uses ridicule to enable critique and promote the possibility of social change.
The essay develops four theses:
1. Satire is marked by a methodological paradox, one committed ethically to promote the process of social change, yet also committed comically to use the symbolic violence of ridicule and artful insult.
2. The postmodern condition exacerbates the dilemma of ethical ridicule that has concerned Western thought for centuries: its apparent lack of centering norms or standard values as a metric for making comic judgments inevitably complicates the contemporary production and reception of satire.
3.The paradox of satire behaving like light at quantum levels, with a dual nature of being both serious and non-serious speech, enables a potential for social (i.e. real-world) impact well beyond other forms of comic art, despite the postmodern condition.
4.Satire may function as comic political speech, but it is not political speech. Therefore satire's intent to reform the body politic through ridicule, its claim to pursue truth as an act of parrhesia (speaking truth to power), even its real world impact, does not place it into the realm of the serious speech acts of policy statements and civic actions.
The essay develops four theses:
1. Satire is marked by a methodological paradox, one committed ethically to promote the process of social change, yet also committed comically to use the symbolic violence of ridicule and artful insult.
2. The postmodern condition exacerbates the dilemma of ethical ridicule that has concerned Western thought for centuries: its apparent lack of centering norms or standard values as a metric for making comic judgments inevitably complicates the contemporary production and reception of satire.
3.The paradox of satire behaving like light at quantum levels, with a dual nature of being both serious and non-serious speech, enables a potential for social (i.e. real-world) impact well beyond other forms of comic art, despite the postmodern condition.
4.Satire may function as comic political speech, but it is not political speech. Therefore satire's intent to reform the body politic through ridicule, its claim to pursue truth as an act of parrhesia (speaking truth to power), even its real world impact, does not place it into the realm of the serious speech acts of policy statements and civic actions.
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The premise for this essay: Dr. King’s idea of a productive tension within a community bears a marked similarity to Jürgen Habermas’s notion of a public sphere in which debate is necessary for social progress. This essay presents satire... more
The premise for this essay: Dr. King’s idea of a productive tension within a community bears a marked similarity to Jürgen Habermas’s notion of a public sphere in which debate is necessary for social progress. This essay presents satire as the comic mode that supplements the communicative rationality of the public sphere. Satire is thus the sign of the comic public sphere. I argue for the recent presence of a new version of satire, satiractivism, which entails a particularly robust presentation of satire’s inherent intent to promote social reform.
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Holger Kersten’s article, “America’s Faith in the Laugh Resistance” maps the long-standing popular argument that satire (as political humor) creates strongly evident and significant effects in the public sphere, and then counters with... more
Holger Kersten’s article, “America’s Faith in the Laugh Resistance” maps the long-standing popular argument that satire (as political humor) creates strongly evident and significant effects in the public sphere, and then counters with scholarly research that often nevertheless accepts the hyperbole of the popular argument as a valid premise that must be refuted. This dynamic has created a theme in academic work on satire, but Kersten’s focus on the satire directed at Donald Trump during his presidential campaign nicely distills it because the refutations are themselves driven by the rhetorical exaggeration of hyperbole.
In December 1877, Sam Clemens participated in the public celebration of John Greenleaf Whittier’s seventieth birthday staged by the publisher of The Atlantic Monthly. The story he told has been stigmatized by William Dean Howells as “that... more
In December 1877, Sam Clemens participated in the public celebration of John Greenleaf Whittier’s seventieth birthday staged by the publisher of The Atlantic Monthly. The story he told has been stigmatized by William Dean Howells as “that hideous mistake of poor Clemens,” and the memory of it for Clemens was apparently so fraught with anxiety and uncertainty about the propriety of telling the tale that it has been referred to it as a primal scene of Mark Twain criticism. Thus, many analyses of the speech and its aftermath investigate the personal stakes for Sam Clemens with a psychoanalytical undercurrent. The other focal point for analysis has been what Mark Twain’s Whittier birthday speech implies for American culture. This essay shows that these disparate focal points name two sides of the same performance of satire rather than advance competing interpretations. Rather than investigate the event as a primal scene that generates a personal story of identity crisis, I will stress the symbolism of cultural processes that enable a narrative of literary history. The speech and reactions to it function as a drama that symbolically enacted American literary culture in 1877.
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Tom Sawyer in his own story changes to a very different Tom Sawyer in “Huckleberry Finn.” Tom in Huck’s story foreshadows Tom Driscoll in “The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson.” Both Toms together suggest how Tom Sawyer’s last name can be... more
Tom Sawyer in his own story changes to a very different Tom Sawyer in “Huckleberry Finn.” Tom in Huck’s story foreshadows Tom Driscoll in “The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson.” Both Toms together suggest how Tom Sawyer’s last name can be read as a satiric archetype; both Toms are sawyers, moral snags representing disruptions of social order. Place this symbolic figure into its equally symbolic setting, the country village, and one can begin to conceptualize what I call Mark Twain’s satiric ur-narrative, a template tale the key iterations of which include these three narratives concerned with antebellum slave culture.
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Research Interests: Art and Literature
When Samuel Clemens finished his sketches on steamboat piloting for the Atlantic Monthly in 1875, he also finished elaborating his fundamental comic device, Mark Twain. His development of Mark Twain as a comic character resembles James... more
When Samuel Clemens finished his sketches on steamboat piloting for the Atlantic Monthly in 1875, he also finished elaborating his fundamental comic device, Mark Twain. His development of Mark Twain as a comic character resembles James Fenimore Cooper’s development of Natty Bumppo—the “lives” of both figures are told by starting with later periods (seasoned reporter and experienced hunter) and moving toward earlier ones (cub pilot and young hunter). Beginning with “Old Times on the Mississippi” and reading in reverse order of publication, in effect we read about Mark Twain “growing up.” In this essay I read “Old Times on the Mississippi,” “Roughing It,” and “The Innocents Abroad” as parts of a larger story, which I refer to as “The Adventures of Mark Twain.” This reading suggests that throughout the early phase of Clemens’s career, Mark Twain often tells a specific kind of story— a comic tale about youth and initiation. Moreover, “The Adventures of Mark Twain,” as a comic Bildungsroman, mocks the assumptions that give it coherence as a narrative.
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To understand Sam Clemens as Mark Twain, one must remember that Clemens created his literary alter ego within the context of mid-19th-century American periodical publication. Clemens explored the possibilities of his comic invention by... more
To understand Sam Clemens as Mark Twain, one must remember that Clemens created his literary alter ego within the context of mid-19th-century American periodical publication. Clemens explored the possibilities of his comic invention by experimenting with high and low registers on a contemporary scale of taste. Though Clemens had models, he succeeded in the marketplace because he created Mark Twain as a comically choleric character within various types of narratives—a semi-fictional figure, part reporter and part yarnspinner, a figure Clemens himself referred to as “an unsanctified newspaper reporter.” Portraying Mark Twain as comically choleric not only helped Clemens to establish a distinctive profile for his literary alter ego, but the tactic also epitomized the tumultuous and sometimes subversive quality of Mark Twain. Thinking of Mark Twain as an unsanctified newspaper reporter suggests the arc of Sam Clemens’s early writing career from an obscure newspaperman on a regional paper to a national author with a best-selling travel narrative, The Innocents Abroad.
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As a contribution to a literary portrait of Nevada that can provide background for Roughing It, this article examines two newspaper correspondents who were contemporaries of Sam Clemens to discern similarities and differences in their... more
As a contribution to a literary portrait of Nevada that can provide background
for Roughing It, this article examines two newspaper correspondents who were
contemporaries of Sam Clemens to discern similarities and differences in their
travel writings: William Wright, who also worked for the Virginia City Territorial
Enterprise; and J. Ross Browne, who traveled to Virginia City to report on the
beginning of the Comstock silver strike for Harper’s Monthly. Both writers evince
the vividness, intimacy, and accurate detail Mark Twain said defined a good correspondent.
Though both writers employ comic elements, Browne comes closer to
the Mark Twain persona in his willingness to burlesque and satirize.
for Roughing It, this article examines two newspaper correspondents who were
contemporaries of Sam Clemens to discern similarities and differences in their
travel writings: William Wright, who also worked for the Virginia City Territorial
Enterprise; and J. Ross Browne, who traveled to Virginia City to report on the
beginning of the Comstock silver strike for Harper’s Monthly. Both writers evince
the vividness, intimacy, and accurate detail Mark Twain said defined a good correspondent.
Though both writers employ comic elements, Browne comes closer to
the Mark Twain persona in his willingness to burlesque and satirize.
ABSTRACT:This article invites a closer look at the misleading use of the term "humorist" to describe Mark Twain, as well as any other number of authors who write comic material, and to suggest the pernicious effects of that practice. The... more
ABSTRACT:This article invites a closer look at the misleading use of the term "humorist" to describe Mark Twain, as well as any other number of authors who write comic material, and to suggest the pernicious effects of that practice. The near ubiquitous use of "humorist" in critical commentary masks or at least obscures the satiric elements in laughable texts, repressing the darker shades of those texts. Light-hearted or amiable laughter has become the sign of the humorist. In a regime that assumes "humorist" as the umbrella term, what happens to the assaults of (ridiculing) laughter that are a hallmark of satirists? Two sets of examples are offered: contemporary reviews of the works of Mark Twain published at the beginning of the twentieth century and remarks taken from recent critical commentary about comic writing. This article also offers a brief description of what its author believes constitutes the core of satire.
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This article refocuses attention on writers who were contemporaries of Sam Clemens, providing an opportunity to single out individuals from the crowd that forms the background for Mark Twain’s preeminence. As a category, “literary... more
This article refocuses attention on writers who were contemporaries of Sam Clemens, providing an opportunity to single out individuals from the crowd that forms the background for Mark Twain’s preeminence. As a category, “literary comedian” groups writers together and excludes others from consideration. These two aspects of the topic dictate the goals in this essay: 1) to spotlight George Derby and his pseudonym “John Phoenix” by using Mark Twain to suggest differences and show similarities, in particular to argue that their use of burlesque as a favorite comic technique exhibits their basic similarity, and 2) to make the case that “literary comedian” as a label to organize nineteenth-century comic writers has little or no practical value.
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This essay examines the commentary by Mark Twain on Hawai‘i —not only in “Following the Equator” but also in letters written to the New York Tribune in 1872, “Letters from the Sandwich Islands” (1866) and his first lecture “Our Fellow... more
This essay examines the commentary by Mark Twain on Hawai‘i —not only in “Following the Equator” but also in letters written to the New York Tribune in 1872, “Letters from the Sandwich Islands” (1866) and his first lecture “Our Fellow Savages from the Sandwich Islands” (1866)—as the deep background to Clemens’s thinking about colonialism and American empire at the turn of the century. What I show is how his representations of Hawai‘i serve as a prelude to the scathing tone of a late satire, “To the Person Sitting in Darkness.”
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In 1866, Sam Clemens visited the Kingdom of Hawai‘i, on assignment as a reporter for the Sacramento Union. From March to July, 1866, Clemens roamed about O‘ahu, Maui, and the Big Island of Hawai‘i, dispatching letters back to the Union... more
In 1866, Sam Clemens visited the Kingdom of Hawai‘i, on assignment as a reporter for the Sacramento Union. From March to July, 1866, Clemens roamed about O‘ahu, Maui, and the Big Island of Hawai‘i, dispatching letters back to the Union that reported on his experience in the Islands. This essay will show the surprising extent to which Clemens as Mark Twain involved himself early in his career in commercial enterprise associated with the Islands.
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Examples taken from the short silent films of Charles Chaplin, specifically the two-reelers he made for Mutual Films in 1916 and 1917, will suggest that slapstick can be usefully understood as a quasi-ritualized and socially-sanctioned... more
Examples taken from the short silent films of Charles Chaplin, specifically the two-reelers he made for Mutual Films in 1916 and 1917, will suggest that slapstick can be usefully understood as a quasi-ritualized and socially-sanctioned expression of proscribed behavior. In addition to arguing that basic elements of slapstick symbolically transgress ideal behavior, the essay will also suggest how the experience of movie-watching in modern western societies approximates the experience of a village-wide audience watching ritual clowning in traditional non-western societies. Viewing Chaplin”s silent slapstick clowning performances with an audience in a movie theater has the potential to create the sense of communitas that Victor Turner argues is part of ritual. Finally, as is the case in the ritual clowning of traditional non-western societies, slapstick clowning potentially subverts as well as conserves the norms of western societies.
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This essay has three focal points to explain the power of Charlie Chaplin’s slapstick talent. First, a taxonomy of three personae for his clown figure: clumsy fool, eironic trickster, comic acrobat. Second, by arguing for slapstick’s... more
This essay has three focal points to explain the power of Charlie Chaplin’s slapstick talent. First, a taxonomy of three personae for his clown figure: clumsy fool, eironic trickster, comic acrobat. Second, by arguing for slapstick’s relation to the idea of bodily intelligence, I provide a way to conceptualize the unruly nature of comic laughter. Third, bringing bodily intelligence into the discussion about slapstick furthers understanding about the mystery of comic laughter.
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Pronouncements by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele in the early eighteenth century about an amiable laughter engendered new conceptualizations of humor, humorist, satire, and satirist that continue to shape discussions about all manner... more
Pronouncements by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele in the early eighteenth century about an amiable laughter engendered new conceptualizations of humor, humorist, satire, and satirist that continue to shape discussions about all manner of comic artifacts. The pronouncements established a new aesthetic, comic belles lettres, revolutionary for literary production and philosophical speculation. To grasp the radical nature of this new aesthetic, this essay considers how long-standing was the classical theoretical tradition about comic art and comic laughter that it revised as well as charts in some detail the particular stages through which that revision developed.
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Few theoretical statements about comic drama and fiction can match the influence of Northrop Frye’s essay, “Mythos of Spring: Comedy.” Particularly for scholars interested not only in classic comic literary forms such as stage comedy, but... more
Few theoretical statements about comic drama and fiction can match the influence of Northrop Frye’s essay, “Mythos of Spring: Comedy.” Particularly for scholars interested not only in classic comic literary forms such as stage comedy, but also in the popular forms of contemporary films as well as television sitcoms, Frye’s theory continues to be useful for understanding basic structures within large quantities of examples. In this essay, I challenge Frye’s model for comic art. Although a quasi-Oedipal plot dominates extant New Comedy, the model suppresses the fact that it is only one significant plot among others capable of generating variations. More importantly, when one examines plays structured by the quasi-Oedipal plot, Frye’s summary – a generational struggle that ends in the son’s triumph – misrepresents the material: the son’s triumph is not a foregone conclusion. New Comedy’s function as the symbolic womb of the Western comic tradition is thus far from unproblematic. My challenge has serious consequences, not just for those critics who have organized their analyses on it, but also for those critics who might theorize about literary and popular art forms, as well as for scholars who would write a history of comic forms in the West.
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The multidisciplinary nature of research on laughter and comic phenomena, research which employs diverse methods in pursuit of diverse goals, creates problems when developing theory for the field as a whole. Especially difficult are... more
The multidisciplinary nature of research on laughter and comic phenomena, research which employs diverse methods in pursuit of diverse goals, creates problems when developing theory for the field as a whole. Especially difficult are ‘‘etic’’ categories, which propose culture-free criteria, in contrast with ‘‘emic’’ categories, concerned with culture-specific criteria. This essay reviews research on smiles and laughter which employs evolution as part of its theoretical framework. Such research includes empirical discoveries about laughter and the physiology of the human body, studies on the cognitive development of infants, arguments about the adaptive function of laughter, and research linking play behaviors with aesthetics. Drawing especially upon the discipline of ethology to compare human behavior with that of other primates, the essay argues for the great usefulness of evolutionary theory as a paradigm to investigate comic phenomena by presenting a synthesizing view of how that theory impacts studies of comic phenomena. In order to stimulate etic theorizing, the concluding section offers five global statements about smiles and laughter as well as about the comic artifacts which elicit these unique human behaviors. Chief among the implications of the review of research is the fundamental nature of the connection between ethology and aesthetics made through comic phenomena.
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ABSTRACT: This article offers examples from the antebellum period that bear out Judith Lee’s matters of empire framework; it exposes the ways in which American humor both continues and breaks away from its English antecedents, showing in... more
ABSTRACT: This article offers examples from the antebellum period that bear out Judith Lee’s matters of empire framework; it exposes the ways in which American humor both continues and breaks away from its English antecedents, showing in particular how Sara Willis Parton as Fanny Fern does and does not fit into aesthetic and philosophical parameters about satire and satirists that can be traced back to English periodicals. After outlining a colonial continuity through a discussion of Parton and two contemporaries, Lewis Gaylord Clark and William Makepeace Thackeray, I go on to suggest that Parton’s Fanny Fern persona also functions as a symbolic origin for a genealogy of women satirists who evoke Hélène Cixous’s image of a laughing Medusa, a genealogy I describe as a neocolonial hybrid because it details American women writing satire to mock and resist the domestic imperium of US patriarchy.
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McTeague should be read as a funny story, but not one split by its comic aspect and its roots in literary naturalism; rather, it offers the intriguing prospect of a close relationship between laughter and naturalism. This essay will... more
McTeague should be read as a funny story, but not one split by its comic aspect and its roots in literary naturalism; rather, it offers the intriguing prospect of a close relationship between laughter and naturalism. This essay will explore that relationship as it demonstrates the function of comic elements in McTeague, a narrative funny in both senses of the word: peculiar as well as laughable. Despite changes in the kind of laughter generated, the heartier tones of slapstick giving way to a laughter fugitive and nervous, the comic is an integral part of the narrative presentation of naturalism, a presentation that turns upon freedom versus determinism. None of the issues and ideas that give naturalism its vitality are inherently a barrier to comic elements, as has been argued in the past. In fact, a naturalistic stress on cause-and-effect explanations for phenomena provided the context for a new theoretic perspective on laughter during the last half of the nineteenth century, which included the views of individuals such Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin, Henri Bergson, and Sigmund Freud. McTeague should be read as a grotesque enactment of that new theory.
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This essay argues that, within his saga of the mythic Yoknapatawpha county, Faulkner dramatizes a variety of possible reactions to Emerson's invitation to draw philosophical conclusions from the natural world. More specifically, Anse and... more
This essay argues that, within his saga of the mythic Yoknapatawpha county, Faulkner dramatizes a variety of possible reactions to Emerson's invitation to draw philosophical conclusions from the natural world. More specifically, Anse and Darl Bundren in "As I Lay Dying," as well as Ike McCaslin in "Go Down, Moses" and Ike Snopes in "The Hamlet," together represent Faulkner’s hypertextual play with the sublime pastoralism implied in the transcendental metaphysics of Emerson.
Within the palimpsest effect of the Yoknapatawpha saga, iteration with a difference proliferates. Darl Bundren replicates Emerson’s transcendental vision of the natural world: both figures function as seers, understanding the flux of all things, but Darl’s second sight intuits dissolution, not ontological unity. Darl parodying Emerson also parodies Ike McCaslin as seer, insofar as the latter’s vision of Old Ben successfully reiterates Emerson’s visionary moment in the woods. However, when Ike McCaslin subsequently fails to imitate Emerson modeling a human being in a transcendent mode, he becomes a tragic parody of Emerson, but not with the same consequences suffered by Darl Bundren. Finally, Anse Bundren at the end of "As I Lay Dying" registers as an absurd parody of the seer figure and its visionary metaphysics.
Within the palimpsest effect of the Yoknapatawpha saga, iteration with a difference proliferates. Darl Bundren replicates Emerson’s transcendental vision of the natural world: both figures function as seers, understanding the flux of all things, but Darl’s second sight intuits dissolution, not ontological unity. Darl parodying Emerson also parodies Ike McCaslin as seer, insofar as the latter’s vision of Old Ben successfully reiterates Emerson’s visionary moment in the woods. However, when Ike McCaslin subsequently fails to imitate Emerson modeling a human being in a transcendent mode, he becomes a tragic parody of Emerson, but not with the same consequences suffered by Darl Bundren. Finally, Anse Bundren at the end of "As I Lay Dying" registers as an absurd parody of the seer figure and its visionary metaphysics.
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In “The Blithedale Romance,” Nathaniel Hawthorne probes his characters’ benevolence and tolerance as well as sympathy, motives underpinning the enterprises of philanthropy and reform. These motives are also part of a long-standing... more
In “The Blithedale Romance,” Nathaniel Hawthorne probes his characters’ benevolence and tolerance as well as sympathy, motives underpinning the enterprises of philanthropy and reform. These motives are also part of a long-standing international discourse about comic laughter, humorous characters, and proper satire, a backdrop of theorizing that began in early eighteenth-century England, theorizing that finds its American apotheosis in Washington Irving’s narrator for “The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.” Hawthorne reinscribes this discourse, its philosophical debate and literary presentation, to stage an examination of the motives for philanthropic reform. Hawthorne constructs his unreliable narrator Miles Coverdale as a failed humorist of a particular sort, one whose humor is marked by the good-natured amiability of a proper gentleman who observes and sketches what he sees for the edification of the reader, as Irving’s narrator does. In effect, Coverdale travesties and becomes a failed substitute Geoffrey Crayon.
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Despite the fact that “Pudd’nhead Wilson” gained its name from a character in the book, David Wilson, many critics have denied, belittled, or ignored his significance to the story. In effect, Wilson has been held to the role of someone... more
Despite the fact that “Pudd’nhead Wilson” gained its name from a character in the book, David Wilson, many critics have denied, belittled, or ignored his significance to the story. In effect, Wilson has been held to the role of someone who moves the plot along but has no intrinsic importance— a mere lever. This view of Wilson also maintains that the aphorisms at the head of each chapter are not attributable to him, nor are they related to the story itself. These judgments dismiss Wilson as a pudd’nhead (accepting Dawson’s Landing’s values without reflection) while implying Mark Twain’s inability to achieve artistic integrity. On the other hand, some readers of the book take Wilson seriously and have shown his intelligence and importance. Nevertheless, the task of comprehensively relating the aphorisms to the narration has been generally neglected. This essay undertakes an examination of the relationship of the aphorisms to the story, not only demonstrating their commentary upon the action and enlargement upon the themes but also showing Wilson’s central position in the work. Furthermore, the Calendar’s function is evidence of Mark Twain’s success as a literary surgeon; it illustrates the integrity of his artistic vision, including the appropriateness of the book’s complete title, “The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson.”
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Hunter Thompson is professional in his reporting and his lying, a claim that can only be understood by grasping the similarities and differences among what Tom Wolfe calls New Journalism, what Thompson calls Gonzo Journalism, and what... more
Hunter Thompson is professional in his reporting and his lying, a claim that can only be understood by grasping the similarities and differences among what Tom Wolfe calls New Journalism, what Thompson calls Gonzo Journalism, and what Mark Twain would call a tall tale. The approximation of these narratives to each other allows for a comparison of Mark Twain and Hunter Thompson. Gonzo-style stories bear a marked affinity to traditional yarnspinning, so much so that Thompson’s “The Curse of Lono,” is best understood when classified as a tall tale.
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This essay argues that the American tall tale is best described as a sub-species of hoax, and that what distinguishes it from its narrative kin is the way it uses fantasy to execute the hoax: the tall tale’s use of a fantastical element... more
This essay argues that the American tall tale is best described as a sub-species of hoax, and that what distinguishes it from its narrative kin is the way it uses fantasy to execute the hoax: the tall tale’s use of a fantastical element differs from that of a folk tale, legend, or myth. Thus the tall tale is never innocent. The tall tale use of fantasy begins the discussion and then the genre’s attitude toward language, which implies a relationship of violence, follows. Next, the essay moves from such intrinsic formal qualities to a consideration of extrinsic conditions, suggesting a relationship with two other institutions of life on America’s frontier in the nineteenth century, the practical joke and the con man. Finally, there is some speculation on a social function for the tall tale.
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ABSTRACT: The “Year's Work in American Humor Studies,” an annual feature of Studies in American Humor since 1999, reviews humor scholarship and related materials, including humor theory, published during the specified year from many... more
ABSTRACT: The “Year's Work in American Humor Studies,” an annual feature of Studies in American Humor since 1999, reviews humor scholarship and related materials, including humor theory, published during the specified year from many disciplinary perspectives. The review gives special emphasis to studies of humor in American culture, broadly conceived.