Laughter and the politics of affect in early modern English literature, 1590-1610
Date
2015
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
The dissertation seeks to problematize the definition of laughter as an object of critical study using a variety of early modern affect theories. Contrary to the predominant paradigm of early modern historical phenomenology—articulated in the works by Gail Kern Paster, Bruce R. Smith, and Mary Floyd-Wilson, among others—that emotions are stable objects whose meaning can be excavated through historical research, this dissertation argues that what we find are competing affect theories as to what “laughter” is. Relying on affect theory by Lauren Berlant, Brian Massumi, and others, the dissertation shows that laughter poses an immediate problem of definition, which scrambles easy distinctions between physiology and psychology, individual and social group. ☐ In addition to this theoretical argument—that we do not know exactly what laughter consists of—this dissertation also makes a historical argument about shifting definitions of laughter in the period. I argue that the period between 1590 and 1610 witnessed a changing definition of laughter: the earlier texts define laughter in accord with the Galenic humoral framework, where laughter is understood as an excess of vitality that characterizes the bodies of young boys, lascivious women, and the bodies of other marginal members in the community. But as we move into the seventeenth century, the definition of laughter starts to change: thus, city comedies by Thomas Middleton and Ben Jonson, or pamphlets like Thomas Dekker’s The Gull’s Hornbook portray laughter not as an involuntary impulse of the body, but as a form of judgment that needs to be cultivated. In these later texts, laughter becomes linked to a mode of urban sociability and the figure of the gallant. The project thus seeks to unmoor laughter from a specific object or body and show how its meaning gets re-assigned to a different set of texts and practices in the early seventeenth century.