Laughter An Essay On The Meaning Of The Comic by Henri Bergson
2014 Reprint of Original 1912 Edition. Exact facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. Laughter is a collection of three essays by French philosopher Henri Bergson, first published in 1900. In a short introduction, Bergson announces that he will try to define the comic, but he does not want to give a rigid definition of the word; he wants to deal with the comic as part of human life. His ambition is also to have a better knowledge of society, of the functioning of human imagination and of collective imagination, but also of art and life. Bergson begins to note three facts on the comic: 1] the comic is strictly a human phenomenon. A landscape cannot be a source of laughter, and when humans make fun of animals, it is often because they recognize some human behavior in them. Man is not only a being that can laugh, but also a being that is a source of laughter. 2] laughter requires an indifference, a detachment from sensibility and emotion: 3] it is more difficult to laugh when one is fully aware of the seriousness of a situation. It is difficult to laugh alone, it is easier to laugh collectively. One who is excluded from a group of people does not laugh with them, there is often a complicity in laughter. Thus the comic is not a mere pleasure of the intellect, it is a human and social activity, it has a social meaning.Keith Ansell Pearson holds a Personal Chair in Philosophy at the University of Warwick, UK.
John Mullarkey is Professor of Film and Television Studies at Kingston University, UK. He is the author of Bergson and Philosophy (Edinburgh UP, 1999), Post-Continental Philosophy: An Outline (Continuum, 2006) and Refractions of Reality: Philosophy and the Moving Image (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Henri Bergson (1859-1941) was one of the most important philosophical figures of the earlier twentieth-century, a cult figure in his day and a profound influence on such thinkers and writers as William James, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gilles Deleuze. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927.| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781015444560 |
| ISBN 10 | 1015444563 |
| Title | Laughter An Essay On The Meaning Of The Comic |
| Author | Henri Bergson |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Legare Street Press |
| Year published | 2022-10-26 |
| Number of pages | 208 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |