The Language of Comic Narratives: Humor Construction in Short Stories

Isabel Ermida

Published by De Gruyter Mouton 2008

The Language of Comic Narratives

Humor Construction in Short Stories

Isabel Ermida

Volume 9 in the series Humor Research [HR]

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110208337

Overview
Contents

About this book

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.

Author / Editor information

Isabel Ermida, University of Minho, Portugal.

Topics

Frontmatter Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	I
Contents Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	V
List of tables and figures Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	IX
Foreword Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	XI
Chapter 1. The concept of humor: history, scope and issues Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Chapter 2. Linguistic resources of humor Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	41
Chapter 3. Humor as a textual genre: from jokes to comic narratives Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	83
Chapter 4. Structural principles of narrative humor Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	113
Chapter 5. Pragmatics of the humorous narrative Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	131
Chapter 6. A model of humorous narratives Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	171
Chapter 7. Extending the analysis Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	207
Backmatter Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	237

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
Audience: Scholars and Researchers in Humor Studies, Stylistics, and Text Linguistics
Pages
- Front matter: 12
- Main content: 261
Keywords: Humor; text linguistics; semantics; pragmatics

eBook

Published: December 10, 2008
ISBN: 9783110208337

Hardcover

Published: October 20, 2008
ISBN: 9783110205145