Friday April 1st, 2016
1:00 – 2:00 pm Registration, Comparative Literature Library, Bingham Hall
2:00 – 2:15 pm Opening Remarks
2:15 – 3:45 pm Panel 1: Jokers, Tricksters and Clowns
Chair: Henry Sussman, Professor of Germanic Language and Literature
Andrea Adhara Gaytán Cuesta (Rutgers), “‘Com a máquina ninguém não brinca!’ Play, mockery and transgression in a Brasilian trickster: Macunaíma, o herói sem nenhum caráter (Mario de Andrade, 1928)”
Dylan Godwin (Stony Brook), “Lyric Spell / Orphic Gag”
Daniel Yu (Emory), “Jest and Gift in Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey”
3:45 – 4:00 pm Break
4:00 – 5:30 pm Panel 2: The Elements of Wit
Chair: Kirk Wetters, Professor of Germanic Language and Literature
Kate Brackney (Yale), “German Tact, English Flippancy, and Jewish Intellectuals: Editing Eichmann in Jerusalem for The New Yorker”
Griffin Shoglow-Rubenstein (Yale), “Narrative Revenge, Narrative Defense: Freud’s Kettle Joke and the Irma Analysis”
Basil Lvoff (CUNY/ Moscow State University), “The ‘Geometry’ of Humor in Russian Formalism: A Non-Psychological Approach”
5:30 – 6:00 pm Break
6:00 – 7:00 pm Keynote: “Dario Fo: Clowns, Popes, and the Peasant’s Bible”
Ron Jenkins, Professor of Theater at Wesleyan University
(LC 317, 63 High Street)
7:30 pm Dinner for conference participants
Saturday April 2nd, 2016
10:15 am Breakfast, Comparative Literature Library, Bingham Hall
11 – 12:30 am Panel 3: Reading Jokes
Chair: Katie Trumpener, Emily Sanford Professor of Comparative Literature and English
Daniela D’Eugenio (CUNY), “Proverbial Jokes: Authors, Victims, and Pragmatism of Humorous Proverbs in Pompeo Sarnelli’s Posilecheata (1684)”
Carolee Klimchock (Asst. Professor Ramapo College, NJ), “Jokes and Sexuality: Heiresses and Coachman Eloping in the Gilded Age”
Tianya Wang (UC Davis), “Against the Idolization of Words: Jokes and Irony in Threads of Talk (《語絲》) (1924-1930)”
1:30 – 3:00 pm Panel 4: Laughter: Aesthetics and the Social
Chair: Morgane Cadieu, Assistant Professor of French Language and Literature
Jeff Fuller (NYU), “Laughing at the Peasant in the Old French Fabliaux: On the Genesis and Signification of the Derisive Laugh”
Mary Mussman (UC Berkeley) “The Laugh of the Medusa’s Grandchild: Ironic Subversions of Gender in Autobiography of Red”
Matthew Ritger (Princeton), “‘Allows of penetration less’: Antiphrasis, Laughter, and Cromwell’s Body in Andrew Marvell’s ‘Horatian Ode’”
3:30 – 5:00 pm Panel 5: The Politics of Humor
Chair: Marijeta Bozovic, Assistant Professor of Slavic Language & Literature
Benjamin Schwartz (Columbia), “‘Just a Natural Musician:’ Humor and the Category of ‘The Natural’ in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man”
Richard M. Davis (University of Chicago), “From Dinah to Danna: Parody Songs in Wartime Japan”
Ozgun Eylul Iscen (Duke), “The Comical in Palestinian Cinema: Films of Elia Suleiman”
5:00 – 5:15 pm Closing Remarks