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Why do modern Americans believe in something called a sense of humor and how did they come to that belief? Daniel Wickberg traces the cultural history of the concept from its British origins as a way to explore new conceptions of the self and social order in modern America. More than simply the ...

Why do modern Americans believe in something called a sense of humor and how did they come to that belief? Daniel Wickberg traces the cultural history of the concept from its British origins as a way to explore new conceptions of the self and social order in modern America. More than simply the history of an idea, Wickberg's study provides new insights into a peculiarly modern cultural sensibility.

The expression "sense of humor" was first coined in the 1840s and the idea that such a sense was a personality trait to be valued developed only in the 1870s. What is the relationship between Medieval humoral medicine and this distinctively modern idea of the sense of humor? What has it meant in the past 125 years to declare that someone lacks a sense of humor? How is the joke, as a twentieth-century quasi-literary form, different from the traditional folktale?

Wickberg addresses these questions, among others, using the history of ideas to throw new light on the way contemporary Americans think andspeak. Specifically British meanings of humor and laughter from the sixteenth century forward provide the framework for understanding American cultural values in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Rhetoric and composition theory has shown a renewed interest in sophistic countertraditions, as seen in the work of such "postphilosophers" as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Helene Cixous and of such rhetoricians as Susan Jarratt and Steven Mailloux. As D. Diane Davis traces today's ...

Rhetoric and composition theory has shown a renewed interest in sophistic countertraditions, as seen in the work of such "postphilosophers" as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Helene Cixous and of such rhetoricians as Susan Jarratt and Steven Mailloux. As D. Diane Davis traces today's theoretical interest to those countertraditions, she also sets her sights beyond them.

Davis takes a "third sophistics" approach, one that focuses on the play of language that perpetually disrupts the "either/or" binary construction of dialectic. She concentrates on the nosequential third -- excess -- that overflows language's dichotomies. In this work, laughter operates as a trope for disruption or breaking up, which is, from Davi's perspective, a joyfully destructive shattering of our confining conceptual frameworks.