January 2009
Lusus et Ludibria:
Late Latin Laughter
Proposed by Catherine Conybeare, Bryn Mawr College
A recent efflorescence of works
explores emotion, gesture, and performance. But what of an elusive
phenomenon
that betrays emotion, that must be performed, but which falls into no
easy
category? Fundamentally involuntary and
unpredictable, laughter may challenge or confirm the possibilities of
communication. It is heard in the triumph of the tyrant and the
resistance of
the martyr. Restrained hilaritas is saintly; rampant risus is devilish.
What
people may laugh at, and why, offers a vivid and unconventional glimpse
of an
age or a moment. We welcome submissions for this panel across a wide
textual
and methodological range, engaging genres that provoke laughter,
laughter
textually embedded, typologies of laughter, and more theoretical
discussions of
the conceptual parameters that laughter proposes and undermines.