The triggers of laughter in spoken language or conversation can often be very simple, such as a change in gesture, or in vocal tone or tempo. Speakers and listeners understand these dynamics of gesture through motor cognition and use them to great effect. The causes of laughter and the experience of humor in written texts, however, are less well understood. In Kinesic Humor, Guillemette Bolens offers a cognitive poetics-based study of triggers of laughter in
texts, focusing in particular on tonic shifts and gesture in plot and narrative.
Bolens shows how literary texts from a variety of periods provide remarkably precise information concerning kinesthesia, the role of tonicity in communication, and the impact of momentum, timing, and tempo on the way in which gestures are processed in human exchanges. She investigates the narrative use of such parameters and how they prompt laughter in a wide-ranging corpus of major authors that includes Chretien de Troyes, Cervantes, Milton, Saint-Simon, Rousseau, Sterne, and Stendhal.
Using the theory of embodied cognition, Bolens shows how thwarted perceptions and expectations of movements and sensations produce the cognitive shifts typical of humor. Bringing together narratology, cognitive studies, gesture studies, humor studies, and historical context, this book offers original
perspectives on important artworks and represents a major contribution to cognitive poetics.
Originally published in French as L'Humour et le savoir des corps in 2016, this volume not only brings the work to an English-speaking audience for the first time but expands significantly on the original by analyzing a new corpus of texts and engaging with recent advances in the field to develop a cutting-edge theory of kinesic humor.
- ISBN10 0190930063
- ISBN13 9780190930066
- Publish Date 24 September 2021
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 216
- Language English