Springer The Comical: A Philosophical Analysis: 47 (Nijhoff International Philosophy Series, 47)

The book offers an extensive and detailed philosophical analysis of the phenomenon of the comic. The author critically presents the hitherto existing theories of the comic from Aristotle up to the present and classifies them. At the same time he advances his own definition of the comic as a broadly understood deviation from norm, which takes into account the deviation from an objectively existing norm as well as the subjective sense of the normal. Many pages have been devoted to the analysis of the main forms of the comic. The author offers their taxonomy and discusses the major techniques of evoking the comic. The final part of the book deals with the social aspects of the comic and discusses the social role of humour, mockery, satire, irony, etc. The author elaborates on the educational, integrating, punitive, and therapeuric aspects of various forms of comic activities. The book is based upon ample material drawn from a multitude of sources. The author does not limit the scope of his analysis to the philosophical and the aesthetic aspects of the comic but takes into account its extra-aesthetic occurrences and applications as presented by psychologists, cultural anthropologists, sociologists, theoreticians and historians of literature, film, and music, which makes the work truly interdisciplinary in character. The Comical: A Philosophical Analysis will be useful to aestheticians and philosophers of art, as well as to the students of literary criticism, theatre, and film studies, educational theory, psychology and even the theory of argumentation.