Comic transactions: Humor as communication in four modern novels

This dissertation presents a new approach to the study of the comic in literary texts, and applies it in readings of four twentieth-century novels. Traditional approaches have tended to place excessive restrictions on the object of literary comic analysis, to neglect the crucial connection between the comic and laughter, and to isolate literary criticism from the growing interdisciplinary field of humor studies. Using semiotics and reception theory as a bridge between contemporary humor studies and literary criticism, this dissertation develops a model of the "comic transaction" which avoids these pitfalls.;The model is tested and elaborated in readings of Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent (1907), Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts (1933), Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire (1962), and Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook (1962). Given that every comic transaction is organized around, and performs work upon, some real tension or contradiction, these readings show how literary humor has participated in some of the major problems of twentieth-century society. It becomes clear that these problems have in various ways strained comic communication and exposed the limited and often negative functions it serves. As a result, the humor in modern fiction increasingly works against itself, seeking to escape or deny its own effects. None of the novels discussed provides much occasion to celebrate humor as a positive or liberating communicative mode. The "joke-work" they are able to perform is, in both its social and symbolic dimensions, more often a cause for despair. The Golden Notebook, however, does wrest from its own despairing involvement with modern humor some hope for a genuinely emancipatory laughter of women.