| 1 |
Introductions
Comedy as a Literary Genre
Comedy as a World-view
Comedy as a Relation to Power
Comedy as an Attitude
Comedy as a Textual Strategy
Comedy as a Relation to "Truth" or Truth-telling |
| 2 |
Why does Dante put Ulysses in Hell?
Is Comedy Funny? |
| 3 |
Subversion, Restlessness, and Established Orders |
| 4 |
Character and Psychology in Chaucer
Irony and Tone: Chaucer's Narrator and Questions of Knowledge and Judgment (What he knows and what he tells; what the characters know about themselves; what we know.) |
| 5 |
Gender and Humor |
| 6 |
Satanic Irony
Satan as "Hero,"
Satan as the Butt of the Joke
Cosmic Order, Milton's Diction, and Grammatical Subordination
Milton's Style: (Greek Epic / Homeric Similes, Biblical Story, Christian Allegory) |
| 7 |
Milton's Problem: Aesthetics vs. Morality
Why Eve Falls First
Why Adam Follows Eve
Why the Great Love-poems of Book IX are Evidence of Original Sin Blake on Milton |
| 8-10 |
Why Romeo is in Love with Someone Else
Why Juliet is Smarter than Romeo
Literary Allusion and "The Book": Cultural Forms and Renaissance Autonomy
What Kind of Love is This?
Modes of Love in Romeo and Juliet (Familial Duty, Civic Citizenship, Erotic Infatuation, Friendship, Identification, Religious Observance, Caretaker (Nurse / Friar), Platonic Form and Difference, Christian Caritas, Christ-like Sacrifice)
Stylistic Analogues and Different Discourses for the Different Modes of Love |
| 11 |
Satire
Must We Mean What We Say?
Satire and its Implied Moral Norm
Is Satire Inherently Conservative? |
| 12-13 |
Is "Bunburying" a Linguistic Strategy or a Moral Position?
How is Wilde's Irony Different from the Irony of the l8th Century Satirists?
If We can't Trust What they Say
How do we Know What the "Meaning" is?
Wildean Comedy and Indeterminancy
Are These Boys Encoded as What We Would See a "Gay"?
Comedy, Irony, and Deviance |
| 14 |
Lies, Lies, Lies
Huck's Country Style and Ethics
Tom as the Center of the Comedy at the Start |
| 15 |
Life on the Raft
Huck and Jim and the Race Question = Huck and Jim and the Question of Language = Huck and Jim and the Question of Lies
Huck's Ethical Development and the Language he Uses to Represent it |
| 16 |
Are the Last Chapters a Disappointment?
In What Ways are the Duke and the Dauphin Different from Tom?
Does Huck Backslide? |
| 17 |
Can Comedy be Progressive?
Brecht's Theories of Comedy and of Epic Theater: What are His Expectations, and How Plausible are They (Do his effects actually work, in your experience of the play?)
Black Humor |
| 18 |
Lecture on Film Montage and Hegelian Triads |
| 19-20 |
Chaplin. |
| 21 |
Old World vs. New World and the Comedy of Cultural Misunderstanding
Humbert Humbert and Self-creation by Text
Literacy and Psychologism
Lolita's Names
Track the Poe Poem Through Humbert's Accounts of His Past, and What Do You Have? |
| 22 |
What to Do With Your Moral Repugnance?
Where Does the Satire Stop?
Is Irony Uncontrollable?
Does "Pure" Aestheticism Preclude Social Critique or Emotional Authenticity? |
| 23-24 |
Yossarian as Anti-hero
The Style of Self-cancelling Assertion: How does Heller Differ from Wilde? From Nabokov? From Humbert? |
| 25 |
The comedy of Voice / The Comedy of Place
Self-revelation and Grace
Gender and Irony |