Loopholes ― Reading Comically

This reprint from 2009 (which has a new introduction) views comedy in literature as a way of understanding and that it can provide insight into the world and everyday experiences. The author argues that comedy can be understood as a mode of thought that brings a specific state of affairs to some kind of unscrupulous irresolution, and that it is a mode of meaning by itself, not in need of analysis through other discourses or merely a literary or theatrical genre. He considers critical and cultural assumptions that limit the understanding of comedy, questioning its trivialization. Using examples of texts and films, he discusses the obsession with the question of power in literary criticism and how it affects theories of and traditional approaches to comic forms, with discussion of Elisabeth Cohen's "Kids Who Died in My High School Last Year"; how the social expression of laughter can be understood in more open and indeterminate ways, including in terms of suffering, as seen in Schindler's List; Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of "reduced laughter," particularly in works by Henry James; comedy's place in the world of moral reflection and philosophical perception, with discussion of the writings of Stanley Cavell; how modern readers share culturally constructed assumptions about comic plots, with the example of Charles Dickens' Pickwick Papers; and the liberatory possibilities of comedy, looking at the definitions of the grotesque in terms of the work of Franz Kafka. Annotation c2014 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)