Call for paper Brumal, dossier: “Humour and the Fantastic”

Editor: Anna Boccuti (Università degli Studi di Torino)

Dead-line:
Publication: june 2018

With this paper we would like to invite you to reflect upon the affinities between Humour and the
Fantastic. Beyond the superficial effects they produce on the reader – which can be placed on the
opposite poles of the wide spectrum from fear to laughter – humour and the Fantastic converge in many
aspects, as it has been often remarked since the modern era: Charles Baudelaire (L'Essence du Rire,
1859) and Sigmund Freud (The Uncanny, 1899; Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious,1905;
Humour, 1927) are among those authors who have tried to account for these forces of the human
imagery and to explain their mechanisms.
In particular, the Fantastic and humour share the same critical attitude towards the so called “real”, that
they constantly try to reverse: for this reason, they can both be considered modes of representation that,
internalizing the real as a rule – that is, a set of natural laws or social conventions or a fixed code –
carry out the violation of this rule and so doing reveal the instability of reality. A look at the literature
of the XX century proves that a great number of authors – among them, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Dino
Buzzati, Italo Calvino, Julio Cortázar, Augusto Monterroso, Julio Ramón Ribeyro, Virgilio Piñeira, just
to mention some of the most popular – has chosen the humorous mode and the ironic enunciation in
order emphasize the effect of alteration of reality due to the Fantastic.
Besides, from the XXI century onwards, the intense use of meta-fictionality in humorous-fantastic
literature has contributed to the post-modern deconstruction of both textual and extra-textual reality,
dimensions often coinciding in the micro-fictions by Ana María Shua, Fernando Iwasaki, Ángel
Olgoso, Andrés Neumann, David Roas. In these contemporary authors, irony, metafiction and humour
have proved to be effective resources for the renewal of the motives and the conventions of the
Fantastic (D. Roas).
This monographic issue of Brumal will accept work focused on the relationship between humour and
and the Fantastic, as it is defined by the journal (therefore, we will not consider other non-mimetic
genres such as science-fiction, fantasy, etc.).
Some areas of research include, but are not limited to:

– Theoric works upon the convergence between the Fantastic and humour in literature and the arts
– The rhetoric / discourse of humour and the rhetoric / discourse of the Fantastic in literature and the
arts
– Theory and analysis of fantastic-humorous texts translation or transposition
– Irony and the Fantastic
– Parody and meta-fiction and the renewal of the Fantastic in contemporary literature
– Black humour and the Fantastic
– Studies on single authors