CALL FOR PAPERS FOR PROPOSED SPECIAL SESSION/ MLA,99
Deadline: March 15, 1999
TITLE: COMIC SCAPEGOATING: HUMOR, CRUELTY AND COMMUNITY IN POSTWAR
AMERICAN FICTION
>From Freud and Nietzsche to Foucault, Cixous, Bakhtin and Bataille, humor,
laughter and the comic have been central elements of modern thought.
Freud, in *Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious* explored the
similarity between jokework and dreamwork and found the same basic
mechanisms of the unconscious in each. Nietzsche, in *The Gay Science*,
exhorts his readers to "laugh at every master who does not laugh at
himself" and to "laugh out the whole truth." Nietzsche led Foucault to
see history as a form of genealogy that laughs at all theories of single
"origin" and prompted Bataille in *Sur Nietzsche* to consider every
integral philosophy a theory of laughter, and every theory of laughter an
integral philosophy. Slavoj Zizek, who himself is fond of mixing Marx
with the Marx brothers, suggests the status of enjoyment in ideological
discourse: the source of totalitarianism is not the lack of laughter, but
"in contemporary societies, democratic or totalitarian,...cynical
distance, laughter, irony, are, so to speak, part of the game. The ruling
ideology is not meant to be taken seriously or literally."
This panel takes humor and irony as the starting point in its readings of
twentieth century post world war II American fiction. Papers are invited
which explore texts from the standpoint of the significance of their
comedy. Possible questions might include: what does it mean to consider
the artist as a comic figure or clown? What roles do fools, jesters,
harlequins, schlemiels or minstrels play in the text's creation of
community? How does society fantasize its enjoyment through imagining a
scapegoat, particularly a comic scapegoat? How do ethnic literatures work
within a comic paradigm to reorganize economies of power and subjection?
And how is self-directed laughter both masochistic and self-transcending,
or a kind of Nietzschean self-overcoming?
Please send 500 word abstracts and a brief academic cv by 3/15 to:
jmackin@sover.net
Jonna Mackin
7 Gates Road
Etna, New Hampshire 03750
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