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 <i>Posthumorism</i>chronicles the scattered emergence of a particular strain of humorless laughter in twentieth-century literature film and philosophy. <br/>From William James's trippy experiments with laughing gas to the wide-open suicide shriek of Major Kong in Stanley Kubrick's <i>Dr. Strangelove</i> modernity is strewn with examples of such laughter - defined by its ability to crack up and destroy whilst opening new horizons of perception.<br/>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.<br/>