A cogent and stylishly written analysis of the non-humorous meanings of laughter, this book explores a unique strain of laughter in modernism that is without humor, without humans, and without humanism, offering a bold new theory of modernism’s affects.
Posthumorism chronicles the scattered emergence of a particular strain of humorless laughter in twentieth-century literature, film, and philosophy. From William James’s trippy experiments with laughing gas to the wide-open suicide shriek of Major Kong in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, modernity is strewn with examples of such laughter, which is defined by a double movement: on the one hand, its ability to “crack up” and destroy; and on the other, its opening onto new, expanded horizons of perception.
Offering a series of case studies into this thoroughly modern (and modernist) gesture of laughter, with particular attention paid to its creative operation, this book explores how various stylists of posthumorist laughter–from Nathanael West and Kurt Vonnegut to Georges Bataille and Hélène Cixous–use it as a tool to unsettle and reconfigure not only the individual human, but also the shapes and forms of humanist discourse.