Machine-Age Comedy

Michael North

Modernist Literature and Culture

Covers a wide range of cultural forms, from discussions of films starring Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton to the art of Marcel Duchamp, to novels by Wyndham Lewis, Samuel Beckett, and David Foster Wallace
Penned by one of the most widely respected modernist scholars writing today
Puts forward the first fully developed theory of comedy in relation to modernity since Henri Bergsons at the beginning of the 20th century. It specifically challenges Bergsons notion that mechanical behavior is the object of comic ridicule, arguing instead that it is the source of comic enjoyment

Machine-Age Comedy

Michael North

Modernist Literature and Culture

Description

In this latest addition to Oxford's Modernist Literature & Culture series, renowned modernist scholar Michael North poses fundamental questions about the relationship between modernity and comic form in film, animation, the visual arts, and literature. Machine-Age Comedy vividly constructs a cultural history that spans the entire twentieth century, showing how changes wrought by industrialization have forever altered the comic mode. With keen analyses, North examines the work of a wide range of artists - including Charlie Chaplin, Walt Disney, Marcel Duchamp, Samuel Beckett, and David Foster Wallace - to show the creative and unconventional ways the routinization of industrial society has been explored in a broad array of cultural forms. Throughout, North argues that modern writers and artists found something inherently comic in new experiences of repetition associated with, enforced by, and made inevitable by the machine age. Ultimately, this rich, tightly focused study offers a new lens for understanding the devlopment of comedic structures during periods of massive social, political, and cultural change to reveal how the original promise of modern life can be extracted from its practical disappointment.

Machine-Age Comedy

Michael North

Modernist Literature and Culture

Author Information

Michael North, Professor of English, University of California, Los Angeles

Machine-Age Comedy

Michael North

Modernist Literature and Culture

Reviews and Awards

"Machine-Age Comedy makes a strong, original historical argument about the cultural ramifications of modern technologies; it intervenes sharply and persuasively in the field of humor theory; and it offers, by way of support for its historical and theoretical arguments, a series of dazzling, witty, and clear-headed readings of modernist films and novels. It's a terrific book." - James English, University of Pennsylvania

"Michael North is one of our most original and insightful interpreters of modernist culture. 'Analyses of humor are not usually very funny,' the reader is warned at the outset, but North's readings and interpretations succeed in being consistently vivid, surprising and illuminating." - Laura Marcus, University of Edinburgh