“Are you being a humorous writer here, or an uninformed one?” A Rhetorical Investigation of Humor in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated and David Foster Wallace’s The Broom of the System

Abstract

The object of the thesis is humor in fiction, as studied from the perspective of rhetorical narratology. While humor research constitutes a field of study branching over several disciplines, its concern with literature is still relatively limited; similarly, rhetorical narratology has rarely taken into consideration the functioning of humor in text. Yet, its interpretation of narrative as an action rather than a structure seems appropriate for the investigation of this particular aspect of fiction, that is the fact that it can indeed do something, it can produce an actual reaction in the reader: laughter. The analysis takes into consideration two novels, Everything Is Illuminated (2002) by Jonathan Safran Foer, and The Broom of the System (1987) by David Foster Wallace, and it accounts for their comicality resorting to the theoretical framework provided by James Phelan’s studies on narrative. More specifically, the first claim of the thesis is that humor can be part either of the mimetic component of a text, as in the case of Foer’s novel (analyzed in chapter 1), or of the synthetic component, as in Wallace’s novel (analyzed in chapter 2). The third chapter explores the implications that the difference between mimetic and synthetic humor holds for the reader, who stands as a vital actor of narrative according to rhetorical narratology and who therefore cannot remain excluded from the investigation. Peter J. Rabinowitz’s studies on audiences provide a crucial resource for the analysis of said implications, which concern both the readers’ knowledge and their ethical positioning with respect to the narrations.