ANTAGONISTIC HUMOR IN THE CONTEXT OF METAFICTION IN THE SELECTED WORKS OF CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN PROSE (ID:881828)

Introduction Thus Art is as natural an artifice as Nature; the truth of fiction is that Fact is fantasy; the made-up story is a model of the world (Barth, 1982 p. 230). The author’s resolution to dedicate this thesis to the literary topic was a natural choice considering the previous writing experience and publication of the BA thesis in the same academic field. Literature, despite being categorized according to its national origin and literary movement, has an ability to appeal to the wide range of audience, as all readers share certain unifying points in the global history. For this reason, the author develops another literary topic that is to be found as a universal language documenting human behavior and experimenting with the readers’ perception at the same time. As suggested above, literature possesses a degree of universality since it is created by humans to record patterns that somehow belong to the mutually shared stereotypes. It is the honest purpose of this thesis to make the reader acquainted with the development of American literature focusing on the genre of metafiction as a vehicle of humor. What is in the scope of this thesis, is the interpretation of selected texts of American contemporary writers, namely the two postmodernists John Barth and Kurt Vonnegut. The choice of these novels was conditioned by many factors such as the similar narrative technique by means of metafiction, cynical language and repeating motifs in both works such as religious, gender and sexual stereotypes. Mentioning narratives, the author’s intention is to detect the presence of metafiction in both novels and prove that it is the source of another investigated feature in this thesis – humor. Following the idea of literature as a universal language, its interconnection to humor studies creates a perfect environment to study the nature of metafiction as a humorous point of supply in the aforementioned texts. Perception of humor is conditioned by many individual aspects such as social and cultural background, education or age, therefore it is challenging to truly and objectively define humor in its very nature. Humor can be an excellent moral shotgun if used creatively and not only as the first plan response to the obviously ridiculous situations. There is a rich amount of the different humorous genres presented throughout various artistic movements. The ambition of this thesis is to direct attention especially those humorous genres that possess certain amount of antagonistic joke and apply their features into the studied 8 literary environment. More precisely, such genres unifying humor and antagonism in this thesis are for example caricature, parody, satire, off-color humor, schadenfreude, self-deprecating humor, obscene humor causing stereotypical gender or sexist offence, anti-joke, off-joke, farce, morbid and mordant humor etc. This work analyzes the role of humor in the peculiar literary context and questions its attributes, source and consequences. The thesis is divided into the theoretical and empirical part mutually complementing each other. The theoretical knowledge in the first part of the thesis is later applied into the practical experimenting with the ambiguous textual environment as chosen by the author. The theoretical part pays specific attention to the examination of antagonistic humor throughout the timeline of modernism and postmodernism, so that the reader can clearly detect the boundaries of American contemporariness, particularly in entertaining devices. In order to make the theoretical background as consistent as possible, the thesis mentions also the social, historical and philosophical trends of the era and its resulting impact on the literary techniques and usage of humor. Another theoretical counterpart to be studied in this part is a phenomenon of humor in American popular culture and literary history, art and media. Theory gradually states the essential nature of what contemporary literature is and distinguishes it from the other literary periods. Although the genre of metafiction is typical mostly for the postmodern literary period, the theoretical part briefly discusses also the pre-war time for better follow-up when detecting antagonistic humor in different environments. Another focal point of this work is the psychology of humor, especially in the context of American entertaining tradition, mentioning its beginnings in vaudeville genre and its current performing phase of popular stand-up comedy. Thanks to the previous thesis dealing with the literature in scope of consumerism, the author also explains the psychology of consumerism, and its role in the rising entertaining industry in America, therefore how consumerism and humor relate. For better understanding, theory illustrates other deliveries of humor than the literary ones, such as significant audiovisual materials that employ all the key terms of the hypothesis. Despite this thesis analyzes American literature, its connection to cultural studies is crucial. Even though the thesis shall be fully narrowed into the literary investigation, the studied element like humor, is an inseparable part of other cultural studies interests e.g. psychology, media, philosophy, language, history etc. It is important not to forget, that every record of literature is a reflection of the concrete society and its idioculture. However, due to restricted amount of space in the thesis, the author takes notice of the 9 two non-literary works in the theoretical part, that represent the use of metafiction which triggers controversial humor. The purpose of the theoretical part resides in linking metafiction as a source of antagonistic humor in American modern and postmodern literature, but also in other American artistic portrayals to show the reader possible exhibition of these key terms in different artistic frameworks. Specifically, audiovisual materials mentioned in the theoretical part like Charlie Chaplin’s movie The Great Dictator (1940) or Orson Welles’ radio play The War of the Worlds (1938) are the cult pieces in American cultural development and considerable for the discourse on controversial motifs presented by means of antagonistic humor. Both formats deal with the technique of metafiction as well as employ humor to underline actual social or historical issues. Theoretical part presents various aspects of humor, but exclusive amount of the text is dedicated to those that are somehow opposing and culturally confrontational in their nature so it serves the original purpose of the thesis to link metafiction to the humor studies. The empirical section deals with the two specific literary works similar in their structure and narrative technique. Firstly the authors of the elected fiction, namely John Barth and Kurt Vonnegut, are introduced to the reader as the two significant pioneers of contemporary American literature. The next chapters search for the literary patterns of postmodern fiction, discuss the textual topicality and compare the overall message and surface framework of the given narratives. There are two actual novels in the thesis, one by each author, videlicet Chimera (1972) by John Barth and Cat’s Cradle (1963) by Kurt Vonnegut. The goal of this thesis is to prove the existence of antagonistic humorous elements in the recognized texts and highlight the presence of metafiction as the source of this occurrence. Eventually, this thesis shall engage idiosyncrasy of contemporary American literature, pointing out mostly postmodern fiction and metaficiton. Putting this into the same analysis together with humor studies paradoxically shows that the purpose of a crudely funny literature is not only entertaining. Humor that is conveyed by the thesis is exhibited in the given fiction by means of dark humor constituents as a social criticism to the behavioral stereotypes and its better understanding. The thesis contributes to the collection of humanities and social sciences study material and can be used as a referential source for language and literature students. 10 The prevalent methodology as it is common for humanities, is the documentary gathering and latter qualitative analysis by means of close reading. In this case it is the analysis of the two novels classified in the same literary movement of American postmodernism while also sharing familiar narration technique and major motifs which makes the comparative analysis possible. The theoretical part is mostly based on a collection of secondary sources mapping the knowledge of disciplines like cognitive and behavioral psychology, literary criticism, literary theory and other social and artistic branches. The presence of interdisciplinary sources in the thesis is needed when studying humor as a response to certain social incoherence. Collection of all these data joins both theoretical and practical part together by the method of synthesis. The research for the theoretical part touches also the translation study, especially when observing the localization of metafictional text dealing with gender identity. Majority of the used sources are accessible in the State Scientific Library in Košice, Slovakia which closely collaborates with the Slovak-American cultural institution InfoUSA, located in the same city and which enabled the data collection for the author’s objectives.