Реферат ” The genre of black humor in American literature: characteristics and examples “

INTRODUCTION

The black humor in American literature received extensive attention of scholars and writers. Because its unique artistic characteristics and artistic charm make it not only become a huge development in the literature, also make readers rethink from the perspective of social and historical reflection in the process of reading.

The School of «Black Humor» («apocalyptic novel», «prose of nightmares», «meta-literature»), which appeared in the American literature of the 1960s (John Bart, John Hawkes, Thomas Pinchon, Donald Bartelmi) traces its origin from the American satire of the mid-20th century.

It gets its name from the American writer Friedman’s collection of “black humor”, and became a popular kind of literature genre and affected the development of American literature. The “black” in the English language symbolizes darkness, depression, and death. And black humor, however, means that this is not the humor in the traditional sense. It doesn’t have a relaxed and happy mood, while it is very desperate and it is the humor in a difficult situation and under the gallows of western society.

The genre of black humor in American literature

Black humor in American literature is, as it were, catalyzed by the social background of confusion and upheaval. In the process of creation, the writers applied existentialism philosophy such as nothing, alienation and absurdity to literary creation. Unlike traditional literary creation, black humor writers showed more negative and pessimistic point of views in their works.

If the hero of modernism often actively denied bourgeois values, empathized with them, rebelled (for example, Henry Miller, in prose and beatnik poetry), then the characters of “black humorists” and, more generally, postmodern writers are mostly passive, obediently drift the current, preoccupied only with their own existence.

When humor is black, it means that the humor has the differences between the traditional one. The first basic principle of “black comedians” – perception of the world as chaos, the second – assertion of the aimless absolute of human existence. So, the basis of absurdist literature is identical to the theory of existentialism – the world is absurd. However, the solutions to the existing contradictions are not the solution of the absurdists – they completely deny the rationality of life and try to defend themselves with laughter against its paradoxical and crippling conflicts and contradictions. The school of “black humor” is a philosophical-aesthetic community of writers, for whom the key concept becomes irony, understood as a way of existence in the world, as a fundamental principle of interpretation of everything that takes place.

The artistic features of American black humor literature – “Catch 22 “as an example Representative of the American black fiction writer, Heller, has other types of work, but his main works are black humor novels, and his representative work is the famous “Catch 22 “.”Catch 22 ” was published in 1961. But with the outbreak and spread of war in Vietnam, the American people fermented an anti-war thought, and the novel is in the subject of anti-war thought.

Thus it drew wide attention of the American people. Some readers comment it as “brutal and sound”, some other evaluate it as “thrilling comedy “, even some evaluate it has the same effect on irony as Rabelais’s novel. The content Catch 22 describes doesn’t exist in real life. As described in the fiction: “Here is only one trap which is Catch 22.”

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