What does it mean to be human? And, more precisely, what does it mean to be human now, with both humanism and the humanities in crisis? In answer to these questions, Laughing on the Brink of Humanity seeks not some essence of the human but rather an epiphenomenal manifestation—a sign of the human. The book finds such a sign in the joyless, painful, and often deadly laughter that resonates when we cross the barrier between what is human and what is not: animality, machinery, divinity. Jan Miernowski brings together a wide swath of discourses and figures, from Plato and the Bible through early modern humanism, to Friedrich Nietzsche, Georges Bataille, Hannah Arendt, Claude Lanzmann, Spike Jonze, Tom Stoppard, and Michel Houellebecq. Looking for laughter on the brink of humanity—in literature and philosophy, natural science and film, theology and computer science—the book offers an exercise in epihumanism appropriate to our posthuman age.

This seminal book examines the dramatic implications of the grotesque in Romantic aesthetics. There are currently no book-length studies exploring the drama of the Romantic grotesque, a category that accentuates multiplicity and hybridity. The post-Kantian philosophy backing Friedrich Schlegel’s Romantic irony provides the most decisive rationalisation of this plurality through theatrical play, and forms the theoretical framework for this study. Poetry and philosophy are merged in Schlegel’s attempt to create Romantic modernity out of this self-conscious blurring of inherited perspectives and genres – a mixing and transgressing of past demarcations that simultaneously create the condition of the Romantic grotesque. The other writers examined in this book include A. W. Schlegel, Stendhal, Victor Hugo, and Baudelaire. The primary question is: how is the grotesque used to re-evaluate notions of aesthetic beauty? An answer emerges from a study of those thinkers in Schlegel’s tradition who evolve a modern, ironic regard for conventional literary proprieties. Furthermore, how does the grotesque rewrite ideas of poetic subjectivity and expression? Here, Back and Forth foregrounds the enormous importance of Shakespeare as the literary example supporting the new theories. Shakespearean drama, which crosses aesthetic borders, legitimises the grotesque while reflecting the blood and gore of a post-Revolutionary Europe. Consequently, in reviewing hybrid texts like the Schlegelian fragments, Stendhal’s Racine et Shakespeare, Hugo’s Préface de Cromwell, and Baudelaire’s De L’Essence du Rire, this book uses theories of continental Romanticism to reposition the significance of a vitally radical English aesthetic. Through this, Back and Forth claims that the Romantic revisioning of the Shakespearean grotesque helps create the ideas of post-Revolutionary modernity that are crucial to the larger projects of European Romanticism, and the ideas of modernity emerging from them.

Light, Laugh, and Human Folly is a collection of novellas centered around anti-heroes living in a society that makes a straight road to success impossible. Alexander Belyaev’s reality-set stories with a touch of science fiction are chillingly close to home. They present the reader with scenarios that are very plausible and easy to imagine witnessing in today’s world. Instead of introducing a traditional hero, who comes and saves the world, Belyaev centers his narrative around individuals who are not only far from heroic but are decidedly unlikable at times. This collection includes the following works: - Invisible Light - Mister Laugh - Doomsday

Reads Beckett's comic timing as part of a post-war ethics of representationSamuel Beckett is a funny writer. He is also an author whose work is taken to respond ethically to the unspeakable seriousness of the post-Holocaust situation. How can these two statements sit together?Ranging widely over Beckett's fiction, drama, and critical writings, and including readings of Murphy, the Trilogy, Waiting for Godot, Endgame, the late prose, and the late plays, the book demonstrates that it is through Beckett's comic timing that we can understand the double gesture of his art: the ethical obligation to represent the world how it is while, at the same time, opening up a space for how it ought to be.Key Features:* Presents innovative readings of the comedy found in Beckett's fiction, drama and critical writings* Spans Beckett's entire oeuvre, using published and unpublished sources* Engages with recent and contemporary philosophical approaches to literature, including work by Derrida, Badiou, Levinas, and Adorno* Makes a unique contribution to theoretical work on comedy and laughter* Provides a rigorous introduction to the theoretical debates surrounding the relationship between modernist literature and a post-war ethics of representation

This essay collection is dedicated to intersections between gender theories and theories of laughter, humour, and comedy. It is based on the results of a three-year research programme, entitled “Gender – Laughter – Media” (2003-2006) and includes a series of investigations on traditional and modern media in western cultures from the 18th to the 20th century. A theoretical opening part is followed by four thematic sections that explore the multiple forms of irritating stereotypical gender perceptions; aspects of (post-)colonialism and multiculturalism; the comic impact of literary and media genres in different national cultures; as well as the different comic strategies in fictional, philosophical, artistic or real life communication. The volume presents a variety of new approaches to the overlaps between gender and laughter that have only barely been considered in groundbreaking research. It forms a valuable read for scholars of literary, theatre, media, and cultural studies, at the same time reaching out to a general readership.

FREEDOM has its own very informative website: visit www.humancondition.com The fastest growing realization everywhere is that humanity can't go on the way it is going. Indeed, the great fear is we're entering endgame where we appear to have lost the race between self-destruction and self-discovery―the race to find the psychologically relieving understanding of our 'good and evil'-afflicted human condition. Well, astonishing as it is, this book by biologist Jeremy Griffith presents the 11th hour breakthrough biological explanation of the human condition necessary for the psychological rehabilitation and transformation of our species! The culmination of 40 years of studying and writing about our species' psychosis, FREEDOM delivers nothing less than the holy grail of insight we have needed to free ourselves from the human condition. It is, in short, as Professor Harry Prosen, a former president of the Canadian Psychiatric Association, asserts in his Introduction, 'The book that saves the world'. Griffith has been able to venture right to the bottom of the dark depths of what it is to be human and return with the fully accountable, true explanation of our seemingly imperfect lives. At long last we have the redeeming and thus transforming understanding of human behaviour! And with that explanation found all the other great outstanding scientific mysteries about our existence are now also able to be truthfully explained―of the meaning of our existence, of the origin of our unconditionally selfless moral instincts, and of why we humans became conscious when other animals haven't. Yes, the full story of life on Earth can finally be told―and all of these incredible breakthroughs and insights are presented here in this 'greatest of all books'.

This book appraises André Brink’s reputation as an internationally acclaimed commentator on the enormities of the apartheid state and one of South Africa’s foremost novelists. Highlighting Brink’s enduring meditation on the writer’s responsibility to a society in a state of moral and political siege and his exemplary position in the interrogation of the subtle discursive strategies of the apartheid establishment, it refers extensively to Brink’s oeuvre, but focuses mainly on his first seven novels in English: The Ambassadors, Looking on Darkness, An Instant in the Wind, Rumours of Rain, A Dry White Season, A Chain of Voices and The Wall of the Plague. Aimed primarily at students of South Africa, it draws on postcolonial theory to examine the ideological implications of the Western aesthetic and intellectual background that nurtured Brink’s imagination, his fixation with the tragic vision, Christian theology, and existentialism, in the context of his professed political affiliations.

Perversion, Pedagogy and the Comic studies how the idea-of-theater shaped western consciousness during the Christian Middle Ages. It analyses developments within western philosophy, Christian theology and theater history to show how this idea realized itself primarily as a metaphor circulating through various discursive domains. Beginning with Plato’s injunction against tragedy the relation between philosophy and theater has been a complicated affair which this book traces at the threshold when the western world became Christian. By late antiquity as theatre was slowly banned, Christian theology put the idea-of-theatre to use in order to show what they understood to be the perverted nature of worldly existence and the mystery of the Kingdom of God. Interrogating the theological teachings of some of the early Church Fathers like St Augustine, Tertullian and Clement of Alexandria the book offers a new look at how the idea of theater not only inspired Christian liturgical practices but Christian pedagogy in general which in turn shaped the nature of Christian religious drama. Finally the author tries to demonstrate how this hegemonic use of the theatre-idea was countered by a certain comic sensibility which opened the idea of theatre in the Christian Middle Ages to a new and subversive materialist possibility. Please note: Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

The definitive text on the pattern recognition theory of humour. When our species turns inward to analyze itself, the two facets of ingenuity and humour are often held in high regard as examples of its unique abilities, and this theory suggests they are more closely connected than has previously been imagined or acknowledged. While adaptability is a necessary facet of biological evolution, its expression in human beings has become accelerated into an intellectual capacity for inventing non-genetic solutions to environmental challenges, producing a versatility and ingenuity that have come to define the species. How does this ability function, then, and what has led to its unparalleled exaggeration in the human race? According to pattern recognition theory, this abundant resourcefulness has arisen due to the presence of a simple, hardwired faculty that exists precisely to encourage it, operating via the recognition of interesting patterns. This, suggests the author, is known as humour. One of two contrasting theories of humour by Clarke, The Faculty of Adaptability interprets amusement as a creative, adaptive system encouraging the invention and discovery of new information and original ideas. Following a detailed description of a schematic model via which such a system could exist, the book proceeds to suggest a timeframe for the evolution of the faculty before addressing the basis for over 100 common stimuli to humour.