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Kinesic Humor: Literature, Embodied Cognition, and the Dynamics of Gesture

by Guillemette Bolens

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How literary gesture and timing can produce laughter

$143.81 USD
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Hardcover New English

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AlbakiReads Editorial

How literary gesture and timing can produce laughter

Guillemette Bolens approaches humor in literature through cognitive poetics, examining how written narratives convey the bodily dynamics that can trigger laughter. The study centers on kinesthesia, tonicity, gesture, momentum, timing, and tempo, asking how readers process these elements when they are embedded in plot and narrative rather than performed in face-to-face conversation. Drawing on texts from multiple periods and a broad corpus of major authors, the book connects embodied cognition with close attention to comic effects on the page. Its emphasis falls on the mechanics of communicated movement and shifting energy as literary resources for humor.

Good fit for readers who enjoy

  • Students and scholars of literary criticism and cognitive poetics
  • Readers interested in embodiment, gesture, and communication in literature
  • Those studying theories of humor and laughter in written texts

Themes

Cognitive poeticsHumor and laughterGesture and kinesthesiaEmbodied cognitionNarrative dynamics

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Book overview

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.

The triggers of laughter in spoken language or conversation can often be very simple, such as a change in gesture, or in vocal tone or tempo. Speakers and listeners understand these dynamics of gesture through motor cognition and use them to great effect. The causes of laughter and the experience of humor in written texts, however, are less well understood. In Kinesic Humor, Guillemette Bolens offers a cognitive poetics-based study of triggers of laughter in texts, focusing in particular on tonic shifts and gesture in plot and narrative.

Bolens shows how literary texts from a variety of periods provide remarkably precise information concerning kinesthesia, the role of tonicity in communication, and the impact of momentum, timing, and tempo on the way in which gestures are processed in human exchanges. She investigates the narrative use of such parameters and how they prompt laughter in a wide-ranging corpus of major authors that includes Chr
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