BIH Masterclass: A Time to Laugh - Session 2

Speaker: Jean-Michel Rabaté, University of Pennsylvania

Chair: Joel McKim, Birkbeck, University of London

The recent US campaign and fraught election results have reminded us of the loaded political significance of political jokes and aggressive laughter. This masterclass will aim to explore the ideological underpinnings of laughter, its links with affect theory, and its impact on the culture of modernism. We will discuss a few foundational texts by Marx, Freud, Bergson and Lacan, and read literary texts by Gide, Beckett, Kafka, Lewis. Because the structure suggested by the Biblical quote, 'A time to laugh', is time-based, the three seminars will follow a temporal schema, while focusing on the question of the modern.

Session two: ‘Machine laughter: the Present’ will discuss texts by La Mettrie, Bergson and Wyndham Lewis. I will sketch a phenomenology of laughter as an expression of affects by using remarks by Lessing and Darwin before examining Yue Minjun’s visual work and a clip from Chaplin’s A King in New York.

This is the second of three sessions that make up this Masterclass. The other sessions are on:

• Session 1: 6 June, 2-4pm
• Session 3, 8 June, 2-4pm

You are welcome to join us for one or all of the sessions.

Recommended reading:

• Freud, The Joke and its relation to the Unconscious, translated Joyce Crcik, London, Penguin, 2003.
• Henri Bergson, Laughter, on line, project Gutenberg.
• Walter Redfern, ‘Bad Jokes and Beckett,’ in French Laughter, Oxford U.P., 2008, p. 161-175.
• Patricia Gherovici and Manya Steinkoler, editors, Lacan, Psychoanalysis and Comedy, Cambridge U. P. 2016.

Jean-Michel Rabaté, is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. One of the founders and curators of Slought Foundation in Philadelphia (slought.org), he is a managing editor of the Journal of Modern Literature. Since 2008, he has been a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Rabaté has authored or edited 38 books on modernism, psychoanalysis, contemporary art, philosophy, and writers like Beckett, Pound and Joyce. Recent books include Lacan Literario (2007), 1913: The cradle of modernism (2007, Chinese translation 2013), The Ethic of the Lie (2008), Etant donnés: 1) l’art, 2) le crime (2010). The Ghosts of Modernity has been republished in 2010. In 2013, he has edited A Handbook of Modernism Studies and a new French translation of Joyce's Exiles. Recent titles include Crimes of the Future (2014), The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and Psychoanalysis, The Pathos of Distance (2016); Think, Pig! Beckett at the limit of the human (2016), and Les Guerres de Derrida (2016).