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Circus of the Mind in Motion
Postmodernism and the Comic Vision

Lance Olsen 		Much has been made over the potentially dark and dangerous side of postmodernism — its antihumanism, its attack on basic assumptions about language and experience, its denial of selfhood. For Lance Olsen, however, there are points of convergence between postmodernism and the comic vision.
Both the comic and the postmodern attempt to subvert all centers of authority — including their own. Both ultimately deride univocal visions. Through radical incongruity of form and vision, both seek to short-circuit the dominant culture's repressive impulses.
After a lively introductory chapter that maps the confluence of postmodernism and the comic vision, Olsen focuses on seven British and American fiction writers, using their works to examine various aspects of the rise and fall of postmodern humor in our culture.		 I. The Tightrope
1. Toward a Theory of Postmodern Humor, or: Christa McAuliffe and the Banana Peel
II. Displaying the Giants
2. A Gydebook to the Last Modernist, or: The Renaissance of the Archaic
III. Sawing the Clown in Half
3. A Janus-Text
4. Garden of Forking Paths
IV. The Mindcircus in Motion
5. Postmodernism as Gag
6. Linguistic Pratfalls
V. Outside the Bigtop
7. Pragmatism, Politics, and Postmodernism, or: Leaving the White Hotel
8. Nostalgia and the Omega
9. Afterburn
 
Humor in Life and Letters Series

$39.95s cloth / ISBN 0-8143-2132-1

172 pages

1990