Humor In Modern American Poetry

Author : Rachel Trousdale
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 : 1628920254
Total Pages : 176 pages
Book Rating : 4.53/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Humor in Modern American Poetry written by Rachel Trousdale and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2017-11-16 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern poetry, at least according to the current consensus, is difficult and often depressing. But as Humor in Modern American Poetry shows, modern poetry is full of humorous moments, from comic verse published in popular magazines to the absurd juxtapositions of The Cantos. The essays in this collection show that humor is as essential to the serious work of William Carlos Williams as it is to the light verse of Phyllis McGinley. For the writers in this volume, the point of humor is not to provide "comic relief,†? a brief counterpoint to the poem's more serious themes; humor is central to the poems' projects. These poets use humor to claim their own poetic authority; to re-define literary tradition; to show what audience they are writing for; to make political attacks; and, perhaps most surprisingly, to promote sympathy among their readers. The essays in this book include single-author studies, discussions of literary circles, and theories of form. Taken together, they help to begin a new conversation about modernist poetry, one that treats its lighthearted moments not as decorative but as substantive. Humor defines groups and marks social boundaries, but it also leads us to transgress those boundaries; it forges ties between the writer and the reader, blurs the line between public and private, and becomes a spur to self-awareness.

Author : Rachel Trousdale
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192648802
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.08/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Humor, Empathy, and Community in Twentieth-Century American Poetry written by Rachel Trousdale and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-12-16 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Humor, Empathy, and Community in Twentieth-Century American Poetry explores how American poets of the last hundred years have used laughter to create communities of readers and writers. For poets slightly outside of the literary or social mainstream, humor encourages mutual understanding and empathic insight among artist, audience, and subject. As a result, laughter helps poets reframe and reject literary, political, and discursive hierarchies—whether to overturn those hierarchies, or to place themselves at the top. While theorists like Freud and Bergson argue that laughter patrols and maintains the boundary between in-group and out-group, this volume shows how laughter helps us cross or re-draw those boundaries. Poets who practice such constructive humor promote a more democratic approach to laughter. Humor reveals their beliefs about their audiences and their attitudes toward the Romantic notion that poets are exceptional figures. When poets use humor to promote empathy, they suggest that poetry's ethical function is tied to its structure: empathy, humor, and poetry identify shared patterns among apparently disparate objects. This book explores a broad range of serious approaches to laughter: the inclusive, community-building humor of W. H. Auden and Marianne Moore; the self-aggrandizing humor of Ezra Pound; the self-critical humor of T. S. Eliot; Sterling Brown's antihierarchical comedy; Elizabeth Bishop's attempts to balance mockery with sympathy; and the comic epistemologies of Lucille Clifton, Stephanie Burt, Cathy Park Hong, and other contemporary poets. It charts a developing poetics of laughter in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, showing how humor can be deployed to embrace, to exclude, and to transform.

Author : Carrie Conners
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN 13 : 149683951X
Total Pages : 88 pages
Book Rating : 4.10/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Laugh Lines written by Carrie Conners and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2022-04-19 with total page 88 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Humor in recent American poetry has been largely dismissed or ignored by scholars, due in part to a staid reverence for the lyric. Laugh Lines: Humor, Genre, and Political Critique in Late Twentieth-Century American Poetry argues that humor is not a superficial feature of a small subset, but instead an integral feature in a great deal of American poetry written since the 1950s. Rather than viewing poetry as a lofty, serious genre, Carrie Conners asks readers to consider poetry alongside another art form that has burgeoned in America since the 1950s: stand-up comedy. Both art forms use wit and laughter to rethink the world and the words used to describe it. Humor’s disruptive nature makes it especially whetted for critique. Many comedians and humorous poets prove to be astute cultural critics. To that end, Laugh Lines focuses on poetry that wields humor to espouse sociopolitical critique. To show the range of recent American poetry that uses humor to articulate sociopolitical critique, Conners highlights the work of poets working in four distinct poetic genres: traditional, received forms, such as the sonnet; the epic; procedural poetry; and prose poetry. Marilyn Hacker, Harryette Mullen, Ed Dorn, and Russell Edson provide the main focus of the chapters, but each chapter compares those poets to others writing humorous political verse in the same genre, including Terrance Hayes and Anne Carson. This comparison highlights the pervasiveness of this trend in recent American poetry and reveals the particular ways the poets use conventions of genre to generate and even amplify their humor. Conners argues that the interplay between humor and genre creates special opportunities for political critique, as poetic forms and styles can invoke the very social constructs that the poets deride.

Author : Calista McRae
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 1501750984
Total Pages : 154 pages
Book Rating : 4.84/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Lyric as Comedy written by Calista McRae and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-15 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A poet walks into a bar... In Lyric as Comedy, Calista McRae explores the unexpected comic opportunities within recent American poems about deeply personal, often embarrassing, experiences. Lyric poems, she finds, can be surprising sites of a shifting, unruly comedy, as seen in the work of John Berryman, Robert Lowell, A. R. Ammons, Terrance Hayes, Morgan Parker, Natalie Shapero, and Monica Youn. Lyric as Comedy draws out the ways in which key American poets have struggled with persistent expectations about what expressive poetry can and should do. McRae reveals how the modern lyric, rather than bestowing order on the poet's thoughts and emotions, can center on impropriety and confusion, formal breakage and linguistic unruliness, and self-observation and self-staging. The close readings in Lyric as Comedy also provide new insight into the theory and aesthetics of comedy, taking in the indirect, glancing comic affordances of poetry. In doing so, McRae captures varieties of humor that do not align with traditional terms, centering abjection and pleasure as facets of contemporary lyric practice.

Author : David Orr
Publisher : Harper Collins
ISBN 13 : 0062079417
Total Pages : 170 pages
Book Rating : 4.11/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Beautiful & Pointless written by David Orr and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2011-04-12 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "David Orr is no starry-eyed cheerleader for contemporary poetry; Orr’s a critic, and a good one. . . . Beautiful & Pointless is a clear-eyed, opinionated, and idiosyncratic guide to a vibrant but endangered art form, essential reading for anyone who loves poetry, and also for those of us who mostly just admire it from afar." —Tom Perrotta Award-winning New York Times Book Review poetry columnist David Orr delivers an engaging, amusing, and stimulating tour through the world of poetry. With echoes of Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer, Orr’s Beautiful & Pointless offers a smart and funny approach to appreciating an art form that many find difficult to embrace.

Author : Bennett Cerf
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.72/5 ( download)

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Download or read book An Encyclopedia of Modern American Humor written by Bennett Cerf and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Eva Gruber
Publisher : Camden House
ISBN 13 : 9781571132574
Total Pages : 278 pages
Book Rating : 4.70/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Humor in Contemporary Native North American Literature written by Eva Gruber and published by Camden House. This book was released on 2008 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Encompassing view of humor in recent Native North American literature, with particular focus on Native self-image and identity. In contrast to the popular cliché of the "stoic Indian," humor has always been important in Native North American cultures. Recent Native literature testifies to the centrality of this tradition. Yet literary criticism has so farlargely neglected these humorous aspects, instead frequently choosing to concentrate on representations of trauma and cultural disruption, at the risk of reducing Native characters and Native cultures to the position of the tragicvictim. This first comprehensive study explores the use of humor in today's Native writing, focusing on a wide variety of texts spanning all genres. It combines concepts from cultural studies and humor studies with approaches byNative thinkers and critics, analyzing the possible effects of humorous forms of representation on the self-image and identity formation of Native individuals and Native cultures. Humor emerges as an indispensable tool for engaging with existing stereotypes: Native writers subvert degrading clichés of "the Indian" from within, reimagining Nativeness in a celebration of laughing survivors, "decolonizing" the minds of both Native and non-native readers, andcontributing to a renewal of Native cultural identity. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of Native Studies both literary and cultural. Due to its encompassing approach, it will also provide a point of entry for the wider readership interested in contemporary Native writing. Eva Gruber is Assistant Professor in the American Studies section of the Department of Literature at the University of Konstanz, Germany.

Author : Ronald Wallace
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 256 pages
Book Rating : 4.69/5 ( download)

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Download or read book God be with the Clown written by Ronald Wallace and published by . This book was released on 1984 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study examines the neglected comic element in American poetry, placing it in the rich and distinctive traditions of American humor.

Author : Frederic Lawrence Knowles
Publisher : Boston : Dana Estes
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 478 pages
Book Rating : 4.81/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Treasury of Humorous Poetry written by Frederic Lawrence Knowles and published by Boston : Dana Estes. This book was released on 1902 with total page 478 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Samuel Hoffenstein
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 217 pages
Book Rating : 4.40/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Poems in Praise of Practically Nothing written by Samuel Hoffenstein and published by . This book was released on 1941 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: