Posthumorism: The Modernist Affect of Laughter

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Examining the multiple non-humorous meanings of laughter, this book explores a unique strain of laughter in modernism that is without humor, without humans, and without humanism. Providing a bold new theory of modernisms affects, Posthumorism chronicles the scattered emergence of a particular strain of humorless laughter in twentieth-century literature, film, and philosophy. From William Jamess trippy experiments with laughing gas to the wide-open suicide shriek of Major Kong in Stanley Kubricks Dr. Strangelove, modernity is strewn with examples of such laughter defined by its ability to crack up and destroy, whilst opening new horizons of perception. Examining the creative operation of posthumorist laughter, this book explores how various stylists of the formfrom Nathanael West and Kurt Vonnegut to Georges Bataille and Hlne Cixoususe it as a tool to unsettle, reconfigure the individual human, and shape different forms of humanist discourse.

Author Bio

Frances McDonald is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Louisville, USA. Her research has appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, American Literature, Post45, and The Atlantic. She is also the co-editor of thresholds, a digital journal for critical/creative scholarship.