Topics in History (492-0-20)

Topic

Laughter as a Historical Category

Instructors

Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern
847/467-3399
Harris Hall - Room 317
YPS is the Crown Family Professor in Jewish Studies at History Department. He edited eight and authored seven books, four of them award-winning. He taught as a visiting professor at various universities in Israel, Russia, Poland, Germany, Ukraine, and USA. Currently he is finishing a book-length project "Fantasis: A History of Modern Laughter."

Meeting Info

Harris Hall room 101: Tues 6:00PM - 9:00PM

Overview of class

As part of the debates about the instructor's book-in-progress entitled "FANTASIS: the History of Modern Laughter," this course fuses historical context and textual analysis in a quest for the heretofore neglected patterns of laughter that characterize European civilization in early modern and modern times. We will not only explore how distinct historical socio-cultural and intellectual circumstances shaped diverse forms of laughter but will also reconstruct paradigmatic patterns of laughter manifested in literary sources in seven-eight languages, across five centuries, and transcending religious, political, cultural, and ethno-national boundaries. We will first introduce several key theories of laughter (including Bergson, Bakhtin, Tynianov, Screech), and then will embark on a journey through texts and epochs ranging from The Ship of Fools by Sebastian Brant and The Praise of Folly by Erasmus of Rotterdam to Cervantes's Don Quixote to Montesquieu's Persian Letters, Voltaire's Candide, Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Gogol's Nose, Joyce's Ulysses, Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. Students will learn how to apply various theories of laughter to literary sources offered in class and far beyond them—to early modern theater, to political satire of the Enlightenment, to modernistic literature, and to contemporary comedy. We will then seek to establish parallels between the newly discovered patterns of laughter and the key modes of thinking and patterns of behavior of post-Renaissance Europeans across cultural, religious, geographical, and language divide. Why did the popular medieval laughter emphasize the lower material bodily stratum to makes things funny? Why did modern writers make things laughable by transforming the material into the spiritual, the real into the fantastic and people into books? Analyzing how laughter is construed in literature, students will focus on the fantasy tradition that have defined the laughter of the secularized modern civilization.

Registration Requirements

Graduate Students Only

Learning Objectives

Training students to identify historical forms of laughter and analyze literary sources through historical lens (1); enhance students' critical skills through slow reading process and questioning the meanings of the text (2); helping students reconstruct distinct socio-cultural contexts that shaped patterns of laughter embedded into the texts (3).

Evaluation Method

participation in class discussion (20 percent), three two-OR two-and-a-half-page long double spaced response papers (30 percent) and a take-home final paper based on a primary text of student's choice (50 percent)

Class Notes

History Major Concentration(s): European
History Minor Concentration(s): N/A