Inter-University Students’ and Researchers’ Conference 2017
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
Ramakrishna Mission Residential College (Autonomous)
Narendrapur,
Kolkata
Limits of Laughter in Cultural Discourse and Practice
November 10-11, 2017
This conference seeks to engage with the rationale of laughter in
literature and other cultural texts. Laughter in this context does not merely
refer to a physiological stimulus but its broadest possible application
incorporating terms such as black humour and carnivalesque. The oldest theory
of laughter goes back to Aristotle, as stated in De anima: “Of all living
creatures only man is endowed with laughter.’’ In the Indian classical text Nฤแนญyaลฤstra,
laughter or ‘hasya’ comes second in the aesthetic hierarchy of the eight rasas,
only after ‘shringara’. The field of humour studies beginning from Aristotle
through Kant, Bergson, Freud and Bakhtin among its contributors on the one hand
and numerous cross-disciplinary hypotheses on the other have attempted to
explain human laughter offering psychological, physiological and sociological
accounts. But the discourse remains cheerfully unstable.
Hobbes’s superiority theory brings in the psychological attitude to
laughter as he locates the origin of laughter in the realization of an
“eminency in ourselves” arising from the comparison with the “infirmity of
others.” Kant focuses on the intellectual origin of laughter by pointing at the
nexus between the perception of the incongruous and laughter. The archetypal
biological definition is offered by Darwin that pins laughter to an efflux of
the excess nervous energy. The
sociological studies trace the shift from genial laughter to subversive
laughter and underpin the fact that laughter can engage in a power game with
institutionalized meanings and pose a political threat to establishment. These
hypotheses despite their avowal of separate disciplines seem to share the idea
that laughter is an aberration from the familiar and the normative. Yet, it is
deeply anchored in some discursive order to be intelligible. In literature,
laughter on most occasions dwells upon an anti-heroic attitude to life’s
incongruities but it might also engage with the gap between personal emotion
and impersonal affect as we encounter (in late modern literature in particular)
laughter without humour, bordering on violence. The representational politics
is problematic because the reasons that make people laugh are sometimes unknown
to both the laughers as well as the observers of laughter.
Considering these issues and
many more, we can seek to understand laughter both on its own terms and in
terms of its form and functionality in texts and culture across history. We
invite papers focusing incisively and analytically on the praxis of laughter;
its instrumentality and everyday struggle with the normative.
Some of the areas
which can be addressed are the following:
Laughter and
aesthetics
Laughter on stage
Laughter and the
scope of subversion
Genres of the comic
Laughter in the
visual medium
Cultural
construction of laughter and the laughable
Laughter and
Gender
Laughter as a
limit-experience
Non-humorous
laughter in modern literature
Censorship,
laughter and the State
We invite abstracts of not more
than 300 words from college/University students and research scholars to be
emailed to the conference convenors at english.rkm@gmail.com.
The names, contact numbers, email ids, and affiliations of those sending
abstracts should be clearly mentioned in the abstracts. Please write “SRC2017
Abstract” in the subject heading of your email.
Deadline for submissions: October 8, 2017
Contact email: english.rkm@gmail.com
Publication of
selected papers is an issue under deliberation.
Important
Dates
Last Date of
submission of Abstracts: 8th October 2017
Notification of
acceptance of Abstract: 14th October 2017
Registration fee
College/University
Students: INR 100/-
Research Scholars
and Independent Scholars: INR 300/-
Queries may be
addressed to the seminar convenors at english.rkm@gmail.com
Image Courtesy: MYC India
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