The Essentials of Foreign Literary Aesthetics - Genre - Black Humor

Essentials of Foreign Literary Aesthetics-Genre-Black Humor

The modernist genre of literature was popular in the United States in the 1960s. Later on, it had a certain influence on the occurrence of western movies and dramas.

"Black humor" was named after the American writer Friedman, who in 1965 published a collection of twelve novels by twelve authors entitled "Black Humor". "Black humor" is also known as "perverted humor", or "gallows humor". The so-called "black" refers to the harsh, terrible and funny social reality; "humor" refers to the cynical and mocking attitude of the subject with free will towards reality. This genre expresses the use of humor to keep calm in a desperate situation, but with a pessimistic and fatalistic color. In fact, it plays the role of anesthesia that promotes the idea of resignation.

Black humor is based on various philosophical trends of modern anti-rationalism, such as Freud's psychoanalysis, Bergson's intuitionism, and Sartre's existentialism, and embodied these philosophical concepts into the creative practice. It inherited the existentialist idea that "the world is absurd and life is painful" and absolutized it, pursuing the expression of the absurdity of the world, the deformity and insanity of the society in the content of the works, and adding inexorable rendering and ridicule to it. They also denied traditional values and had a tendency to be "non-heroic", often depicting people's subconscious and complex inner feelings. Although the works expose and satirize the shortcomings of capitalist society, they are ultimately comforted by nihilism, pessimism and pacifism. Aesthetically, "black humor" basically belongs to the category of comedy, but with a strong sense of despair and tragedy.

In the art form, this genre in time and space to break the traditional structure, inverted, staggered chronological order, subjective ideas at will, so that the past, the present and the future mixed up, confusing, loose and chaotic plot, and often with the image of the implied, contrast, backdrop, symbolism and other techniques, reflecting some of the basic features of Western modernist literature. The main writers of this genre are Joseph Heller and his "Twenty-Two Rules of War", Kurt Von Gernet and his "Slaughterhouse Five" and so on.