BiblioVault - Books about Humor in literature

Dinner Pieces

Leon Battista Alberti

Harvard University Press, 2024

An innovative collection of comedic stories by the original “Renaissance man.”

Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472) was among the most famous figures of the Italian Renaissance. His extraordinary range of abilities as a writer, architect, art theorist, and scientist made him the original model for the many-sided “Renaissance man.”

A collection of stories meant to be read while dining and drinking, the Dinner Pieces, or Intercenales, are one of Alberti’s most innovative and experimental works, mixing literary genres and styles of prose composition adapted from both Greek and Latin models. They cover a wide range of topics, from moral philosophy, politics, and religion to the arts, money-making, love and friendship, and the study of the humanities. The Dinner Pieces offer satiric commentary on the cultural illusions and moral myths of Alberti’s day. They cut through the absurdity of human existence with the blade of wit and laughter and constitute an important monument in the history of comic writing.

This English translation by David Marsh is based on the authoritative Latin text of Roberto Cardini, accompanied by ample notes.

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Dinner Pieces

Leon Battista Alberti

Harvard University Press, 2024

An innovative collection of comedic stories by the original “Renaissance man.”

Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472) was among the most famous figures of the Italian Renaissance. His extraordinary range of abilities as a writer, architect, art theorist, and scientist made him the original model for the many-sided “Renaissance man.”

A collection of stories meant to be read while dining and drinking, the Dinner Pieces, or Intercenales, are one of Alberti’s most innovative and experimental works, mixing literary genres and styles of prose composition adapted from both Greek and Latin models. They cover a wide range of topics, from moral philosophy, politics, and religion to the arts, money-making, love and friendship, and the study of the humanities. The Dinner Pieces offer satiric commentary on the cultural illusions and moral myths of Alberti’s day. They cut through the absurdity of human existence with the blade of wit and laughter and constitute an important monument in the history of comic writing.

This English translation by David Marsh is based on the authoritative Latin text of Roberto Cardini, accompanied by ample notes.

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Ruse and Wit

The Humorous in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish Narrative

Dominic Parviz Brookshaw

Harvard University Press, 2012

The essays in Ruse and Wit examine in detail a wide range of texts (from nonsensical prose, to ribald poetry, titillating anecdotes, edifying plays, and journalistic satire) that span the best part of a millennium of humorous and satirical writing in the Islamic world, from classical Arabic to medieval and modern Persian, and Ottoman Turkish (and by extension Modern Greek). While acknowledging significant elements of continuity in the humorous across distinct languages, divergent time periods, and disparate geographical regions, the authors have not shied away from the particular and the specific. When viewed collectively, the findings presented in the essays collected here underscore the belief that humor as evidenced in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish narrative is a culturally modulated phenomenon, one that demands to be examined with reference to its historical framework and one that, in turn, communicates as much about those who produced humor as it does about those who enjoyed it.

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Wit's End

Women’s Humor as Rhetorical and Performative Strategy

Sean Zwagerman

University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010

In Wit’s End, Sean Zwagerman offers an original perspective on women’s use of humor as a performative strategy as seen in works of twentieth-century American literature. He argues that women whose direct, explicit performative speech has been traditionally denied, or not taken seriously, have often turned to humor as a means of communicating with men.

The book examines both the potential and limits of women’s humor as a rhetorical strategy in the writings of James Thurber, Zora Neale Hurston, Dorothy Parker, Edward Albee, Louise Erdrich, and others. For Zwagerman, these texts “talk back” to important arguments in humor studies and speech-act theory. He deconstructs the use of humor in select passages by employing the theories of J. L. Austin, John Searle, Jacques Derrida, Shoshana Felman, J. Hillis Miller, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Zwagerman offers arguments both for and against these approaches while advancing new thinking on humor as the “end”—both the goal and limit—of performative strategy, and as a means of expressing a full range of serious purposes.

Zwagerman contends that women’s humor is not solely a subversive act, but instead it should be viewed in the total speech situation through context, motives, and intended audience. Not strictly a transgressive influence, women’s humor is seen as both a social corrective and a reinforcement of established ideologies. Humor has become an epistemology, an “attitude” or slant on one’s relation to society.

Zwagerman seeks to broaden the scope of performativity theory beyond the logical pragmatism of deconstruction and looks to the use of humor in literature as a deliberate stylization of experiences found in real-world social structures, and as a tool for change.

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