Humor as Narrative and Cultural Strategy

Some of the most powerful and influential American novels and media phenomena use home-grown modes of humor as tools for profound social or -zeitgeist- criticism. We will investigate those (interrelated) modes of humor, ranging from folk tall tale comedy, the subaltern African American humor, zany postmodernist grotesqueness, and 21st-century humor of parodic allusion. We will look at Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn (1884) (excerpts), William Faulkner's short story -Shingles for the Lord- (1943), and J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye (1951) as applications of the vernacular folk tradition of tall tale humor. The African American -John- tales (with influences from African, tall tale and Scots-Irish traditions) weave their way through North American culture to emerge in such diverse products as Ralph Ellison's masterpiece Invisible Man (1952), rap texts, scenes from Spike Lee's movies, and Dave Chappelle's deliberately provocative stand-up comedy. Kurt Vonnegut's dark laughter often revolves around the most unlikely topics for humor, such as the bombing of Dresden in his Slaughterhouse Five (1969) - along with other postmodernist anti-war novels from this era such as Catch-22 (1961) or the popular 1970s TV series M.A.S.H. The Simpsons would lose its profile without the allusions and intertextual references to hallowed literary works (Poe's -The Raven-, for instance), institutions, and icons, just as such widely diverse recent films as Shrek (2001) and Inglourious Basterds [sic] (2009) needs the meta-level of elaborate quoting from other films and cultural documents for their complex humor. We will read Salinger's bildungsroman The Catcher in the Rye in its entirety (note: Salinger died in January 2010 and his cult novel is now being revisited), as well as Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. The theory, short stories and excerpts from novels will be contained in the seminar reader. Anglistik - Sprachpraxis Universität Siegen 20101 SoSe 2010 Ph.D. Waegner Cathy Ph.D