Issue Details: First known date: 2004... 2004 'But Say, It is My Humour': Poetry and the Human Comedy
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Asked to talk or write on humour in prose or poetry, I have frequently refused. Audiences generally expect that a discussion of humour should be humorous in itself, but that's a matter for after-dinner speakers, paid comedians, and stand-up comics who work from scripts with another end in view. I have reflected on comedy and humour for as long as I can remember, wondering less perhaps at the things that make us laugh or smile than at the fact that we do so. Like the nature of poetry, the nature of comedy compels self-reflection in those who practise it or are concerned by it. Umberto Eco's novel The Name of the Rose hinges on the attempt to expunge comedy from the world, yet the joke, if one can call it that, is that the copy of the ancient treatise that lies at the heart of the novel's interest kills those who inquire too deeply. It is as if humour is, in one interpretation of the medieval world-view (for that world is infinitely amenable to manipulation), a notion not to be countenanced. The novel itself is a disquisition on the mind of a puritan for whom the idea of a divine comedy is appalling; to such a mind, a comedic account of nature appears to call into question the seriousness of the creator—artist. Eco's puritanical custodian of the book on comedy is a type of censor for the ages: closed-society guardian, book-burner, torturer and burner of people. Comedy and humour, so considered, are serious matters.' (Introduction)

 

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Five Bells vol. 11 no. 2 Autumn 2004 Z1130551 2004 periodical issue 2004 pg. 9-12
  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon The Poetic Eye : Occasional Writings 1982-2012 Michael Sharkey , Netherlands : Brill , 2016 10632316 2016 selected work criticism

    'This volume contains a selection of the Australian poet Michael Sharkey’s uncollected essays and occasional writings on poetics and poets, chiefly Australian and New Zealand. Reviews and conversations with other poets highlight Sharkey’s concern with preserving and interrogating cultural memory and his engagement with the practice and championing of poetry. Poets discussed range from Lord Byron to colonial-era and early twentieth-century poets (Francis Adams, David McKee Wright, and Zora Cross), underrepresented Australian women poets of World War I, traditionalists and experimentalists, including several ‘New Australian Poetry’ activists of the 1970s, and contemporary Australian and New Zealand poets. Writings on poetics address form and tradition, the teaching and reception of poetry, and canon-formation. The collection is culled from commissioned and occasional contributions to anthologies of practical poetics, journals devoted to literary and cultural history and book reviewing, as well as newspaper and small-magazine features from the 1980s to the present. The writing reflects Sharkey’s poetic practice and pedagogy relating to the teaching of literature, rhetorical analysis, cultural studies, and writing in universities'.

    Source: Publisher's blurb.

    Netherlands : Brill , 2016
    pg. 455-463
Last amended 5 May 2020 09:59:31
9-12 'But Say, It is My Humour': Poetry and the Human Comedysmall AustLit logo Five Bells
455-463 'But Say, It is My Humour': Poetry and the Human Comedysmall AustLit logo
Newspapers:
    Powered by Trove
    X