Reading & Composition

This course experiments with different approaches to close reading through the diversions and subversions of comedy. We will get used to treating the forms of wordplay that provide most jokes with their punchlines as corresponding to aspects of literary style, from ambiguity to anticlimax, from clashing registers to the much-maligned pun. We will also look for ways that the same slipperiness of meaning plays a role in our own everyday speech habits, and in the media that saturate our social formation and participation. The course theme is intended primarily to attune the undergraduate reader and writer to fine stylistic distinctions in literary texts, but also secondarily to reveal, and to offer descriptive terms for, the ways language plays games in our lives at large. For this reason, we’ll read with an eye out for the ways language and comedy structure and reconfigure broader social themes, from gender and sexual politics, to childhood and family psychology, to the establishment of cultural and legal norms. As opposites to seriousness/reality, the relationships between comedy, dreams, theater, and pretense will guide our readings of concrete comic “correctives” (e.g., nonsense verse, surrealism, performance art, childhood play, and camp). The course balances texts from a range of genres and media (including film, television and advertising) with critical texts that suggest the unexpected force of play and the “comic attitude” in and out of literature. As always, students should be aware that an R/C course is especially writing-intensive, but in this course an additional willingness to pause over, discuss and play with linguistic details is a must.

Readings

• Aristophanes, Lysistrata

• William Shakespeare, As You Like It

• Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Ernest

• Muriel Spark, Loitering With Intent

• Harryette Mullen, Muse & Drudge

There will also be a Course Reader consisting of 1) selected the poetry and prose of Emily Dickinson, Lewis Carroll, G. M. Hopkins, Edward Lear, Franz Kafka, Edward Gorey, Donald Barthelme, Georges Perec, and Lydia Davis; and 2) short selections from the critical writings of Friedrich Schiller, Henri Bergson, Sigmund Freud, Johan Huizinga, Kenneth Burke, D. W. Winnicott, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Erving Goffman, Vivian Gornick, and Susan Sontag.

Visual Media

Buster Keaton, Sherlock Jr.

Marx Brothers, Duck Soup

Jenny Livingstone, Paris is Burning

Monty Python’s Flying Circus (selected episodes)

Arrested Development (selected episodes)

Art works by Barbara Kruger & Jenny Holzer

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