Kinesic Humor: Literature, Embodied Cognition, and the Dynamics of Gesture [Hardcover]

Literature is one of the richest sources of information concerning the ways in which human beings play with cognition. Human cognition is grounded in the ability to feel, perceive, and move.Kinesic Humorexamines literary works written in different languages and various historical periods, in which the cognitive processing of gestures and kinesic interactions trigger humorous effects. By bringing together literary studies, cognitive studies, gesture studies, and humor studies, this book offers an original perspective on literary artworks such as Chr?tien de Troyes'Yvain, Milton'sParadise Lost, Cervantes'Don Quixote, Rousseau'sConfessions, Sterne'sTristram Shandy, and Stendhal'sLe Rouge et le Noir.This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.The triggers of laughter in spoken language or conversation can often be very simple, such as a change in gesture, or in vocal tone or tempo. Speakers and listeners understand these dynamics of gesture through motor cognition and use them to great effect. The causes of laughter and the experience of humor in written texts, however, are less well understood. InKinesic Humor, Guillemette Bolens offers a cognitive poetics-based study of triggers of laughter in texts, focusing in particular on tonic shifts and gesture in plot and narrative.Bolens shows how literary texts from a variety of periods provide remarkably precise information concerning kinesthesia, the role of tonicity in communication, and the impact of momentum, timing, and tempo on the way in which gestures are processed in human exchanges. She investigates the narrative use of such parameters and how they prompt laughter in a wide-ranging corpus of major authors that includes Chr?tien de Troyes, Cervantes, Milton, Saint-Sils(