ENGL 574: Studies in English Lit before 1800:
Theorizing Laughter and Comedy in Premodern Literature before 1800
Professor: Dr. Yunah Kae
Location: College of Charleston
Time: Wednesday 5:30 – 8:15
Modality: Face-to-Face
Laughter appears to come naturally to human beings. But why, exactly, do we laugh? Do we laugh because something is actually funny, or because we want to seem smart enough to get the joke? And if we laugh, what (or who) are we laughing at? Comedy is never innocuous. Often as not, comedy rests on culturally shared ideas of gender, race, ethnicity, and social class, and it continually engages in constructing differences between groups of peoples: those who might be deemed “important,” “serious,” and “high”, or “expendable,” “low,” and “comic.”
Our broad goal in this course is to understand the politics and literary history of this popular genre of entertainment. In order to do this, we will read comedies and comic literature from the classical period to the Restoration, including Roman plays by Plautus and Terence, medieval mystery plays, satire and satirical poetry, city comedies by Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton, and the comedy of manners. Alongside our primary material, we will read theories of laughter, comedy, and aesthetics by Aristotle, Montaigne, Freud, Henri Bergson, Lauren Berlant, Sianne Ngai, and more. And to further investigate how conventions of the genre has changed and evolved from their premodern predecessors, we will also study contemporary forms of comedy, such as the rom-com, sitcom, standup comedy, and digital content—including memes, TikToks, and Instagram reels.
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