黑Black_Humor选读.ppt

Black Humor Black humor is an important literary term of America in 1960’s.The word black humor comes from a name of a book, which is written by B.J. Friedman. Black humor refers primarily to a kind of bitter and often outrageous satire. Ordinary characters or situations are usually exaggerated far beyond the limits of normal satire or irony. Black humor uses devices often associated with tragedy and is sometimes equated with tragic farce. 2.Development (1) Coinage(创造) in France Black humor is a term coined by Surrealist theoretician André Breton in 1935, to designate a sub-genre of comedy and satire in which laughter arises from cynicism and skepticism, often about the topic of death. (2) Adoption in American literature An English-language anthology（文集） edited by Bruce Jay Friedman, titled Black Humor, imported the concept in the U.S., labeling with it very different authors and works, arguing that they shared the same literary genre. Writers: Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Joseph Heller and Philip Roth. The rationale（理论根据） for applying such label to them is that they have written novels, poems, stories, plays and songs in which profound or horrific events were portrayed in a comic manner. Sample 1 Dong Cunrui went to the heaven after he died. God asked:” Why did you died?” Dong Cunrui answered :”I was killed by a detonator when I dynamited a pillbox.” God was very angry:” Nonsense! How dare you cheat me?” Dong said:” I don’t cheat you.” God said:” You believed that I hadn’t know the science? As everyone known, explosion only produces water and Carbon Dioxide . You must be drowned in the water or killed by Carbon Dioxide. How did you be killed by the explosion?” In reality, people of the petrochemical industry in Jilin said:” Explosion only produces water and Carbon Dioxide, so it won’t pollute water source.” Note Farce: a light humorous play full of silly things happening 笑剧,闹剧,滑稽戏 Detonate: to (cause to ) explode by means