Poetics of Laughter. Irony, Comics, Humour and Grotesqueness in Italian Literature and Drama of the Early 20th Century
Abstract
The conference named Poetics of Laughter was dedicated to individual and collective (avant-garde) poetics created in the early 20th century, in which laugh is a means of expression, subversive element of intellectual and artistic clichés or tool to overcome the pain and crisis. Although the domination of laughter was already announced at the 19th century (Baudelaire, Dossi, Nietzsche), in the 20th century the phenomenon of laughter began subject of the research not only in the field of philosophy and aesthetics, but of many modern disciplines, such as psychology or anthropology.
The individual contributions have focused not only on classics of Italian literature of that period, such as: Pirandello, Svevo, Gadda, Palazzeschi, De Filippo, but also on a number of authors often unjustly neglected just because they were humorists: Savinio, Landolfi, Brancati, Zavattini, Campanile, Rosso di San Secondo, Bontempelli, Bracco. Laughter has been studied and reflected as a means of deformation, liberation, games, as a tool to overcome the pain, as an expression of pain, as a linguistic and / or psychological tics, like a mask and as a means to unmask.
The interesting and erudite contributions of speakers from around the world (also Japan and Brazil) have offered an opportunity for a rich debate.