Nadia Boudidah Falfoul
University of Monastir, Tunisia
Abstract
Talking about the revolutionary power of women's laughter, Jo
Anna Isaak affirms that “the crisis of authority and value,” that is
symptomatic of postmodernism, has been “instigated largely by a feminist
deployment of laughter.” Since the 1980s, women’s humor discourse has become
part of a rapidly growing corpus of works by contemporary writers who engage a
wide variety of comic techniques in order to explore alternative forms of
resistance to mechanisms of control and containment.
The argument behind this paper is to show how the American short story
writer, Lorrie Moore (b-1957) uses humor as
a subversive tool, a way of
confronting tragedy and a vehicle to critique various psychological, social, and political
issues about women’s lives. Her
collections of short stories, namely Self-Help (1985), Like-Life (1990), Birds
of America (1998), and The Collected Stories (2008), provide alternate ways of thinking about the
humorous texts by examining their contexts—not just their contents. Analysed
contextually, Moore’s “comic” stories emerge as forms of human communication
whose con/textual implications are startling, engaging, and profound.
Keywords:
postmodern short story, women's humor, comic narrative, subversive humor,
contextualized humor, female identity.
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