Posthumorism

Examining the multiple non-humorous meanings of laughter this book explores a unique strain of laughter in modernism that is without humor without humans and without humanism. Providing a bold new theory of modernism''s affects Posthumorism chronicles the scattered emergence of a particular strain of humorless laughter in twentieth-century literature film and philosophy. From William James''s trippy experiments with laughing gas to the wide-open suicide shriek of Major Kong in Stanley Kubrick''s Dr. Strangelove modernity is strewn with examples of such laughter – defined by its ability to “crack up” and destroy whilst opening new horizons of perception.Examining the creative operation of posthumorist laughter this book explores how various stylists of the form-from Nathanael West and Kurt Vonnegut to Georges Bataille and Hélène Cixous-use it as a tool to unsettle reconfigure the individual human and shape different forms of humanist discourse.