Sections offered FALL 2021:
#45677 |
EYAL PERETZ |
MW 1:10-2:25pm |
BH 340 |
CLASS NOTES: COLL (CASE) A&H Breadth of Inquiry credit; meets with CMLT-C 492
Above class meets In Person. For more information visit https://covid.iu.edu/learning-modes/index.html
A burst of laughter – that is, a laughter that overtakes us by surprise, as if in spite of ourselves, causing us to lose ourselves, lose who we are and who we are determined to be – and a happy ending, thus an ending where our desire is fulfilled. Establishing the link between these two seems to be the central achievement of the comic work of art. In distinction from other artistic genres, such as tragedy or melodrama, where self loss – a loss of home, or social position, or property – seems to set one on a trajectory of unhappiness and frustrated desire – in comedy it is self loss in which the secret to happiness seems to reside. How can this be? How is it that self loss can be the road to happiness? What is the secret to happiness which comedy holds? These will be the questions that will occupy this class as we investigate the question of the comic work of art. We will be reading some of the most celebrated comic works from Shakespeare and Moliere to our times, as well as some of the most influential theoretical texts about the comic, and we will be watching some of the greatest screen comedies from Charlie Chaplin, the Marx brothers, Ernst Lubitsch, and Preston Sturges, and some tv comic series from Seinfeld to Schitt’s Creek.