Module: ENG5115-20 The Literature of Laughter

Level: 5

Credit Value: 20

Module Tutor: Chris Ivic

Module Tutor Contact Details: c.ivic@bathspa.ac.uk

1. Brief description and aims of module:

For centuries works of literature have solicited laughter– belly, bitter, despairing, manic, Rabelaisian, subversive, wry, ironic… – from listening and reading audiences. Examining a variety of literary texts from different historical periods, this module reflects on how and why texts incite laughter in order to examine the social, cultural, ideological and political work that laughter performs.

This module introduces you to critical and theoretical work on laughter, including extracts from the writings of, for example, Michael Billig, Mikhail Bakhtin, Henri Bergson, Simon Critchley, Sigmund Freud. Different types of humour--from absurd to caustic to therapeutic--will be examined, as will a range of generic forms--dramatic, poetic, novelistic and visual.

Indicative set texts might include: Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, Behn’s The Rover, excerpts from Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, joke books from eighteenth-century Bath, Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Byron’s poetry, cartoons from the Punch Archives, Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, Gibbon’s Cold Comfort Farm, Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, Moore’s Fool, contemporary standup routines, Bean’s England, People Very Nice, and Netflix’s Dear White People.

The module also allows you to build on the L4 module (Worlds of Ideas) Keyword group project by enabling you to respond critically, creatively and imaginatively to the texts and theories we examine while contributing collaboratively to research across the Humanities.

2.Outline syllabus

Whilst the texts and topics studies in any one year may change according to the availability of editions and publication of new scholarship, the module’s syllabus will cover the following broad themes and periods: 

• Critical and theoretical approaches to laughter and humour in literature, culture and thought

• Histories of comedy / Comedies of history – from Shakespeare to the Restoration and the Age of Satire

• Irony, wit, and sarcasm in the novel – from Austen’s comedy of manners to modernist reinventions of humour as social critique 

Intersectional humour – the politics of gender, sex, class and race in modern and contemporary writing

3.Teaching and learning activities

The teaching on this module will include lectures, seminars, workshops, tutorials and, potentially, field trips. 

Assessment Item 1:

• Assessment Type: Course Work

• Description: Keywords Task: 2000 words  

• % Weighting: 40%

Assessment Item 2:

• Assessment Type: Course Work

• Description: Essay: 3000 words 

• % Weighting: 60%