Enter Rabelais LaughingEnter Rabelais Laughing

1998 Barbara C. Bowen

Laughing Rabelais " Un éclat de rire énorme " was the judgment on Rabelais of Victor Hugo , whose ex cathedra statements tend to mean less the more one studies them . This one is actively misleading , if it implies that characters in ...

Author: Barbara C. Bowen

Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press

ISBN: 0826513069

Category:

Page: 264

View: 261

Read & Download

Francois Rabelais (1483?-1553) is a difficult and often misunderstood author, whose reputation for coarse "Rabelaisian" jesting and "Gargantuan" indulgence in food, drink, and sex is highly misleading. He was in fact a committed humanist who expressed strong views on religion, good government, education, and much more through the mock-heroic adventures of his giants. While most books about Rabelais have relatively little to say about his comedic genius, Enter Rabelais, Laughing analyses the many sides of Rabelais's humor, focusing on why his writing was so hilariously funny to sixteenth-century readers. The author begins by discussing how the Renaissance defined laughter and situates Rabelais in a long tradition of literary laughter. Subsequent chapters examine specific contexts relevant to Gargantua and Pantagruel, beginning with the comic aspects of epic, chronicle, mock-epic, and farce, and proceeding to Renaissance and Reformation humanist satire, rhetoric, medicine, and law. All of these chapters combine information, much of it new, on the humanist message Rabelais wanted to convey to his readers, with an analysis of how he used his wit to reinforce his message. Rarely is a writer's work treated in such illuminating detail. On a broad level, Enter Rabelais, Laughing serves as an excellent introduction to French Renaissance literature and exhibits a remarkably charming and lucid writing style, free of jargon. To Rabelais scholars in particular it offers a thorough and innovative analysis that corrects misconceptions and questions commonly held views.

Laughter in the Middle Ages and Early Modern TimesLaughter in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times

2010-09-22 Albrecht Classen

... holds more than 150 references to laughter, or her contemporary Rabelais, who contended that ”rire est le propre de l'homme. ... Enter Rabelais, Laughing [Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1998], xiii; also, Ch. 1, 1-28).

Author: Albrecht Classen

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

ISBN: 9783110245486

Category:

Page: 862

View: 649

Read & Download

Despite popular opinions of the ‘dark Middle Ages’ and a ‘gloomy early modern age,’ many people laughed, smiled, giggled, chuckled, entertained and ridiculed each other. This volume demonstrates how important laughter had been at times and how diverse the situations proved to be in which people laughed, and this from late antiquity to the eighteenth century. The contributions examine a wide gamut of significant cases of laughter in literary texts, historical documents, and art works where laughter determined the relationship among people. In fact, laughter emerges as a kaleidoscopic phenomenon reflecting divine joy, bitter hatred and contempt, satirical perspectives and parodic intentions. In some examples protagonists laughed out of sheer happiness and delight, in others because they felt anxiety and insecurity. It is much more difficult to detect premodern sculptures of laughing figures, but they also existed. Laughter reflected a variety of concerns, interests, and intentions, and the collective approach in this volume to laughter in the past opens many new windows to the history of mentality, social and religious conditions, gender relationships, and power structures.

Laughter and PowerLaughter and Power

2006 John Phillips

41 ) is mildly comic in being completely incomprehensible ; to Rabelais's intended reader , who can decipher the reference ... on Rabelais and law in my Enter Rabelais , Laughing ( Nashville : Vanderbilt University Press , 1998 ) , pp .

Author: John Phillips

Publisher: Peter Lang

ISBN: 3039105043

Category:

Page: 264

View: 795

Read & Download

Laughter and power are here examined in a variety of contexts, ranging from the satires of Renaissance Humanism through to the polemics of contemporary journalism. How do the powerful use laughter as a cultural weapon which reinforces their position? How do the powerless use laughter as a last resort in their self-defence? Sixteenth-century intellectuals applied their satires to a campaign against intolerance. Seventeenth-century absolutism demanded of comedy that it serve its interests. Yet subversive humour survived, even at the court, and led through the Enlightenment to its apogee in the black humour of Sade. Twentieth-century experimental fiction owes that trend a conscious debt. Meanwhile an aesthetic tradition, represented here by Flaubert, Beckett and Queneau, incites a laughter which releases tension rather than raising awareness. As humour theorists, Bergson, Freud and Koestler help focus these concerns.

A History of English LaughterA History of English Laughter

2002 Manfred Pfister

... goes some way towards establishing another tradition , and another topos - but that will have to wait for another occasion . As for Goethe , cf. Howes 1974 , 431-435 . 81 Bowen , Barbara C .: Enter Rabelais , Laughing .

Author: Manfred Pfister

Publisher: Rodopi

ISBN: 9042012889

Category:

Page: 220

View: 306

Read & Download

Is there a 'history' of laughter? Or isn't laughter an anthropological constant rather and thus beyond history, a human feature that has defined humanity ashomo ridens from cave man and cave woman to us? The contributors to this collection of essays believe that laughter does have a history and try to identify continuities and turning points of this history by studying a series of English texts, both canonical and non-canonical, from Anglosaxon to contemporary. As this is not another book on the history of the comic or of comedy it does not restrict itself to comic genres; some of the essays actually go out of their way to discover laughter at the margins of texts where one would not have expected it all – in Beowulf, or Paradise Lost or the Gothic Novel. Laughter at the margins of texts, which often coincides with laughter from the margins of society and its orthodoxies, is one of the special concerns of this book. This goes together with an interest in 'impure' forms of laughter – in laughter that is not the serene and intellectually or emotionally distanced response to a comic stimulus which is at the heart of many philosophical theories of the comic, but emotionally disturbed and troubled, aggressive and transgressive, satanic and sardonic laughter. We do not ask, then, what is comic, but: who laughs at and with whom where, when, why, and how?

A Companion to Fran ois RabelaisA Companion to Fran ois Rabelais

2021-08-30 Bernd Renner

targetingsocialandreligiouspretense.40Still,Rabelaisknowsthatheispushing the envelope: that is why he added “et ... see Duval, The Design of Rabelais's Pantagruel, 140; Bowen, Enter Rabelais, Laughing (Nashville-London: 1998), 110–114; ...

Author: Bernd Renner

Publisher: BRILL

ISBN: 9789004460232

Category:

Page: 639

View: 436

Read & Download

Twenty-two eminent scholars of Early Modernity offer a thorough examination of the art and the main themes of François Rabelais’s work in the larger context of European humanism.

The Rabelais EncyclopediaThe Rabelais Encyclopedia

2004 Elizabeth Chesney Zegura

Readings : Barbara C. Bowen , Enter Rabelais Laughing ( Nashville , TN : Vanderbilt University Press , 1998 ) ; Floyd Gray , Rabelais et le comique du discontinu ( Paris : Champion , 1994 ) ; Daniel Ménager , La Renaissance et le rire ...

Author: Elizabeth Chesney Zegura

Publisher: Greenwood Publishing Group

ISBN: 0313310343

Category:

Page: 328

View: 319

Read & Download

Hundreds of alphabetically arranged entries detail the life and work of Rabelais, the greatest French writer of the Renaissance.

Divine Play Sacred Laughter and Spiritual UnderstandingDivine Play Sacred Laughter and Spiritual Understanding

2005-10-20 P. Laude

Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Barnhart, Bruno and Joseph Wong ... Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Bowen, Barbara C. (1998). Enter Rabelais, Laughing.

Author: P. Laude

Publisher: Springer

ISBN: 9781403980588

Category:

Page: 273

View: 342

Read & Download

This study in the relationship between religion and the comic focuses on the ways in which the latter fulfils a central function in the sacred understanding of reality of pre-modern cultures and the spiritual life of religious traditions. The central thesis is that figures such as tricksters, sacred clowns, and holy fools play an essential role in bridging the gap between the divine and the human by integrating the element of disequilibrium that results from the contact between incommensurable realities. This interdisciplinary and cross-cultural series of essays is devoted to spiritual, anthropological, and literary characters and phenomena that point to a deeper understanding of the various mythological, ceremonial, and mystical ways in which the fundamental ambiguity of existence is symbolized and acted out. Given its interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspective, this volume will appeal to scholars from a variety of fields.

tudes rabelaisiennes tudes rabelaisiennes

2003

... Enter Rabelais , Laughing , ch . 5 , on the therapeutic power of laughter . 167 Let me quote , once again , G. Demerson on puns : « Le calembour , par sa ridicule inadéqua- tion , révèle l'énergie que l'homme garde pour dire vrai ...

Author:

Publisher: Librairie Droz

ISBN: 2600008691

Category:

Page: 150

View: 831

Read & Download

Pieter Bruegel and the Art of LaughterPieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter

2006-02 Walter S. Gibson

1998. Enter Rabelais, Laughing. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. Braet et al. 2003. Braet, Herman, Guido Latré, and Werner Verbeke, eds. Risus medievalis: Laughter in Medieval Literature and Art, Medievalia Lovaniensia, Series I, ...

Author: Walter S. Gibson

Publisher: Univ of California Press

ISBN: 9780520245211

Category:

Page: 291

View: 285

Read & Download

In this delightfully engaging book, Walter S. Gibson takes a new look at Bruegel, arguing that the artist was no erudite philosopher, but a man very much in the world, and that a significant part of his art is best appreciated in the context of humour.

The World Upside Down in 16th Century French Literature and Visual CultureThe World Upside Down in 16th Century French Literature and Visual Culture

2018-09-11 Vincent Robert-Nicoud

For Bakhtin, the power of laughter in Rabelais overturns the oppressive, official institutions by exalting what they ... Enter Rabelais, Laughing (Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 1998); Peter Frei, 'Le Scandale de Rabelais: Une Renaissance ...

Author: Vincent Robert-Nicoud

Publisher: BRILL

ISBN: 9789004381827

Category:

Page: 298

View: 134

Read & Download

In The World Upside Down Vincent Robert-Nicoud offers an account of the topos of the world upside-down in sixteenth-century French literature and visual culture with reference to the social, political, and religious turmoil of the period.