Gender and Humour II

Detailed Table of Contents

Editorial

Margaret D. Stetz: Notes on the Effect of Mr. Max Beerbohm on a Woman Writer

Abstract: Although Regina Barreca, the feminist comic theorist, has lamented the anxiety that supposedly keeps women from joking at the expense of those who have hurt them, Dame Rebecca West (1892–1983), the British novelist and critic, felt no such compunction. The laughter, moreover, that underpinned West’s “Notes on the Effect of Women Writers on Mr. Max Beerbohm,” from Ending in Earnest: A Literary Log (1931), was very angry indeed, and its origins were both political and personal. Her comic assault on Max Beerbohm (1872–1956) was a defense of working women in general, and of professional female authors in particular, against his attacks on their wish to be self-sustaining and competent human beings, rather than anachronistic ornaments. It was also, however, a response rooted in private grievance, for West was both an avowed admirer and an emulator of Beerbohm’s satirical and fantastic narratives, and she deeply resented his failure to respect her as she respected him. Indeed, it is impossible to understand West’s modernist fiction, such as Harriet Hume (1929), without acknowledging its debt to Beerbohm and to his 1890s Aesthetic Movement male contemporaries, such as Oscar Wilde, from whom she derived many of her comic strategies.

Author's Bio: Margaret D. Stetz, the Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women’s Studies and Professor of Humanities at the University of Delaware, has published over 100 essays on women’s literature and culture, on film, and on 19th and 20th Century publishing history. She has also been curator or co-curator of seven exhibitions on late-Victorian print culture and the visual arts. Among her recent books are British Women’s Comic Fiction, 1890–1990 (2001), Gender and the London Theatre (2004), Facing the Late Victorians (2007), and the co-edited volume, Michael Field and Their World (2007).

Diana Mantel: Carnival and Carnivorous Plants Gender and Humor in the Works of Ruth Landshoff-Yorck

Abstract: My article focuses on the connection of gender and humour in some works of the German-American author Ruth Landshoff-Yorck. My analysis will show that, while both topics are important, their connection changes over the course of Landshoff’s work: it is light and easygoing in the early works, full of joyful transgression in aspects of gender and sexuality, like in her novel Die Vielen und der Eine (1930), but carnal and sometimes disgusting in the later ones, like in the short story The Opening Night (1959) and its German version, Durch die Blume (1957) – especially in the omnivorous (and omnisexual) plant appearing in these stories. The theoretical foundation for the analyses carried out in this article is provided by Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories of the Grotesque and Carnivalesque. Bringing together Bakhtin and Landshoff and investigating their parallels and contrasts can not only illuminate Landshoff’s works, but also widen the understanding of Bakhtin’s theory of humor, in order to demonstrate the extent to which these ideas are helpful in relation to aspects of gender.

Author's Bio: Diana Mantel, Magister Artium, studied German Literature, Literary Theory and Comparative Literature and Communication Studies at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU) and Venice International University (VIU). She has been working as a Graduate Teaching Assistant and Graduate Research Assistant and is member of the International PhD programme “Literature” at LMU. She is currently completing on PhD on “Persephone und der Underground – das Gesamtwerk von Ruth Landshoff-Yorck”.

Eduard Andreas Lerperger: "More Than Just Another Dumb Blonde Joke" Humor and Gender in Anita Loos's Novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Howard Hawks's Film Adaptation

Abstract: Humor is a central element, if not the cornerstone, of both Anita Loos' highly humorous, satirical novel Gentlemen prefer Blondes and Howard Hawkes' 1953 film adaptation of the same name which stars Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell. Yet Loos' novel and the film use very different forms and registers of humor in order to achieve very different aims. The 1925 novel reads like a guidebook to the liberated and emancipated lifestyle of the 1920s flapper and provides the reader with an unadorned, strongly satirical view of Western culture. The humor of the film adaptation is of a more situational kind and relies heavily on slapstick. This essay aims to compare and contrast the kinds of humor employed by both novel and film version with a special focus on the relationship of the two main characters, Lorelei and Dorothy. It examines the way in which male and female characters are portrayed in general and investigates how humor and satire is used in order to challenge the firm order of class and society. It is the aim of this essay to draw a clear, differentiated image of these two very distinct works. Furthermore, this analysis tries to find possible reasons for the loss in translation from book to film as well as to find examples where critical themes and satire can still be found but in another form.

Author's Bio: Eduard Lerperger is a diploma student at the University of Salzburg’s English department. Among his fields of research are popular culture studies such as television, film and comic studies. He is interested in humor and satire in literature, such as in the novels of Anita Loos, P.G. Wodehouse and Stephen Fry. He is well versed in fantastic and speculative fiction and is preparing his diploma thesis on literary prizes in science fiction. This is his first publication.

Christine Künzel: The Most Dangerous Presumption Women Authors and the Problems of Writing Satire

Abstract: The essay discusses the question why it is that women writers are almost absent from the canon of satirical writing. While female writers have managed during the 20th Century to establish themselves in all genres of literature, satire, with very few exceptions, has remained a territory for male writers. One of the main arguments for this absence is the fact that satire is one of the most aggressive forms of humour. While the tabooisation of aggression, which to a certain extent undermines satire, also applies to male authors, the position of the female writer, already rendered precarious by its deviation from the norm, is exacerbated by her position as a satirist and as a woman. German writer Gisela Elsner (1937-1992), lately being referred to as an “older sister” to Elfriede Jelinek, has accurately described this position as a “literary ghetto.” The example of the reception of Elsner’s work demonstrates how a blocking-out of a certain female tradition of satire reveals not only the limits, but also the blind spots of feminist-leaning women’s literature studies.

Author's Bio: Christine Künzel, PD Dr. phil., 1997 M.A. in German Studies, American Studies and Philosophy at the University of Hamburg. 2003, Ph.D. at Humboldt-University Berlin. 2000-2006, teaching assignments at the universities of Hamburg, Hannover and Oldenburg. Winter-semesters 2006/07, 2007/08, 2009/10 and in summer-semester 2009, work as substitute professor of contemporary German literature and theatre at the German Department of the University of Hamburg. July 2011, Habilitation (post-doctoral degree) with a study on the complete works of Gisela Elsner at the University of Hamburg. Since 2006 editor of the works of Gisela Elsner published at Verbrecher Verlag, Berlin.

Anja Gerigk: Dis-placing Laughter in “30 Rock” Beyond Corporate Comedy or Back to the Funny Female's Modern Roots

Abstract: The significance of 30 Rock’s TV comedy for gendered laughter can only be evaluated fully if historical and theoretical perspectives are combined: Between Liz Lemon and her Boss Jack Donaghy a socially pre-modern comedy of carnivalesque reversal and familiarization clashes with a type of ambiguity that results from the different systems within modern society as described by Niklas Luhmann. While the corporate man’s sense of humour is tied to institutional hierarchies the funny female character may have become an institution – as head writer and star comedienne –, but her metafictional ironies are used to risk and secure follow-up in a way that shows awareness both of the change in social organization and the established status of women in comedy today. Even if the conditions of being subversive are not the same as in earlier waves of feminism and modernity, 30 Rock’s arrangement of comic modes owes its sophistication not simply to media intertextuality, the history and gender politics of comic communication turn out to be more structurally revealing.

Author's Bio: Dr Anja Gerigk, born 1977, research assistant in German literature (NdL), Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, PhD 2005 University of Bamberg, studies in German and English/American literature at Bamberg and the University of St. Andrews. Monographs: Das Verhältnis ethischer und ästhetischer Rede über Literatur (2006), Literarische Hochkomik in der Moderne (2008); edited volume Glück paradox (2010, transcript Verlag). Published articles focus on narrative modernity and on the methodology of cultural history.