The language of comic narratives : humor construction in short stories / by Isabel Ermida.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ermida, Isabel, 1968-

Series:

Humor research ; 9.

Humor research, 1861-4116 ; 9

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Humor in literature.

Short story--Authorship.

Short story.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (274 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Berlin ; New York : Mouton de Gruyter, c2008.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

The book offers a comprehensive account of how humor works in short stories, by presenting a model of narrative comedy that is pragmatically as well as semantically, grammatically and stylistically informed. It is the first study to combine a sequential analysis of the comic short story with a hierarchical one, merging together horizontal and vertical narratological perspectives in a systematic way. The book covers the main areas of linguistic analysis and is deliberately interdisciplinary, using input from philosophy, sociology and psychology so as to touch upon the nature, motivations and functions of humor as a cognitive phenomenon in a social context. Crucially, The Language of Comic Narratives combines a scholarly approach with a careful explanation of key terms and concepts, making it accessible to researchers and students, as well as non-specialists. Moreover, it reviews a broad range of historical critical data by examining the source texts, and it provides many humorous examples, from jokes to extracts from comic narratives. Thus, it seeks to anchor theory in specific texts, and also to show that many linguistic mechanisms of humor are common to jokes and longer, literary comic narratives. The book tests the model of humorous narratives on a set of comic short stories by British and American writers, ranging from Evelyn Waugh and Dorothy Parker, through Graham Greene and Corey Ford, to David Lodge and Woody Allen. The validity of the model is confirmed through a subsequent discussion of apparent counter-examples.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

List of tables and figures

Foreword

Chapter 1. The concept of humor: history, scope and issues

Chapter 2. Linguistic resources of humor

Chapter 3. Humor as a textual genre: from jokes to comic narratives

Chapter 4. Structural principles of narrative humor

Chapter 5. Pragmatics of the humorous narrative

Chapter 6. A model of humorous narratives

Chapter 7. Extending the analysis

Backmatter

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [237]-256) and index.

ISBN:

9786611993535

9781281993533

1281993530

9783110208337

3110208334

OCLC:

476276035