... in African American Literature . By Gene Andrew Jarrett. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press. 2007. 223 pp. $47.50. Laughing Mad: The Black Comic Persona in Post-Soul America . By Bambi Haggins. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press. 2007. x, 274 pp. Cloth, $68.00; paper, $23.95. Book...

...Teresa A. Goddu © 2010 by Duke University Press 2010 Shades of Green: Visions of Nature in the Literature of American Slavery, 1770–1860 . By Ian Frederick Finseth. Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press. xi, 348 pp. 2009. $39.95. Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions...

...Mike Chasar In the first three decades of the twentieth century, a new and modern type of African American laughter was increasingly and aggressively sounded in the sonic landscape of the United States. Praised by poet Helene Johnson as an “arrogant and bold” laugh that did not synchronize...

... across three primary media sites: Jacques Derrida’s writing, criticism of the televisual laugh track, and Miranda July’s 2005 film Me and You and Everyone We Know . Proposing we consider not only parentheses as textual marks but also “parentheticality” as a relational structure, Scheible’s essay weaves...

... reveals the poststructuralist impulses of West’s novel, which explicitly stages the distinction between being and becoming through two different strains of laughter. The first is a self-reflexive laughter , an emotionally legible “ha-ha” that fixes the laughing person as a general type and in so doing...

... abolitionism license to be hortatory and humorous at the same time, as seen in Douglass’s editorial apology for ex-fugitive Samuel Ringgold Ward’s “off-color” self-effacements upon arriving in England in 1853: “Samuel is by nature a laughing philosopher, and enjoys fun with a rel- American Literature...

... in the per- ception of imperfection,” Dunne divides his set of writers into two camps: one that seems to laugh at imperfect beings (William Bradford, Nathanael West) and one that laughs with them (Mark Twain, William Faulkner). African American Literature and the Classicist Tradition: Black Women...

... . Athens : Univ. of Georgia Press . Los Angeles Star . 1861 . “ Photograph of Lincoln—Read and Laugh,Laugh and Rread—Read It Again and Read It Deeper .” June 8 . Loughran Trish . 2007 . The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of US Nation Building, 1770-1870 . New York...

... dolls, to this perplexing final walking bridge, the novel’s uncanny and discomfiting images suggest a persistent underlying concern with the dynamics of automatism and perception. The narrator’s last words to his castratorsNow let’s see you laugh, scientistspoint us toward the set...

... and Realism in African American Literature. By Gene Andrew Jarrett. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press. 2007. 223 pp. $47.50. Laughing Mad: The Black Comic Persona in Post-Soul America. By Bambi Hag- gins. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press. 2007. x, 274 pp. Cloth, $68.00; paper, $23.95...

... and Realism in African American Literature. By Gene Andrew Jarrett. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press. 2007. 223 pp. $47.50. Laughing Mad: The Black Comic Persona in Post-Soul America. By Bambi Hag- gins. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press. 2007. x, 274 pp. Cloth, $68.00; paper, $23.95...

... and Realism in African American Literature. By Gene Andrew Jarrett. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press. 2007. 223 pp. $47.50. Laughing Mad: The Black Comic Persona in Post-Soul America. By Bambi Hag- gins. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press. 2007. x, 274 pp. Cloth, $68.00; paper, $23.95...

... and Realism in African American Literature. By Gene Andrew Jarrett. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press. 2007. 223 pp. $47.50. Laughing Mad: The Black Comic Persona in Post-Soul America. By Bambi Hag- gins. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press. 2007. x, 274 pp. Cloth, $68.00; paper, $23.95...

... and Realism in African American Literature. By Gene Andrew Jarrett. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press. 2007. 223 pp. $47.50. Laughing Mad: The Black Comic Persona in Post-Soul America. By Bambi Hag- gins. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press. 2007. x, 274 pp. Cloth, $68.00; paper, $23.95...

.... Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press. 2007. 223 pp. $47.50. Laughing Mad: The Black Comic Persona in Post-Soul America. By Bambi Hag- gins. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press. 2007. x, 274 pp. Cloth, $68.00; paper, $23.95. Carlyle Van Thompson’s Eating the Black Body: Miscegenation...

... and Realism in African American Literature. By Gene Andrew Jarrett. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press. 2007. 223 pp. $47.50. Laughing Mad: The Black Comic Persona in Post-Soul America. By Bambi Hag- gins. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press. 2007. x, 274 pp. Cloth, $68.00; paper, $23.95...

... and Realism in African American Literature. By Gene Andrew Jarrett. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press. 2007. 223 pp. $47.50. Laughing Mad: The Black Comic Persona in Post-Soul America. By Bambi Hag- gins. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press. 2007. x, 274 pp. Cloth, $68.00; paper, $23.95...

... and people rather than in the static existence of the beloved. Bill Barich (Laugh- ing in the Hills) heals from a loss when he accepts his inability to handicap the horse races he is so taken with and when he recognizes the essential and vital...

...’’ (RCP, 247). To this charge, Brown’s response is laughter: ‘‘I laugh. Down deep in my gut I laugh. I can hear Gilbert laughing with me. I can hear the dudes who presently live in my own padThoseguys wouldn’t do what I told...

....” 9 For another perspective on these moments of formal compression, see Glenda Carpio’s book Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery , in which she argues that throughout The Conjure Woman , “one is caught between a desire to laugh and the suspicion that, in doing so, one could...