Naslov
Humour in the Novel 'Osmi povjerenik' (The Eighth Commissioner) by Renato Baretić

Autori
Zergollern-Miletić, Lovorka

Vrsta, podvrsta i kategorija rada
Sažeci sa skupova, sažetak, znanstveni

Skup
32nd International Conference of CALS: Language and mind

Mjesto i datum
Rijeka, Hrvatska, 03.05.2018. - 05.05.2018

Vrsta sudjelovanja
Predavanje

Vrsta recenzije
Međunarodna recenzija

Ključne riječi
humour, linguistics, research

Sažetak
Renato Baretić is a contemporary Croatian author. His novel The Eighth Commissioner is his best known work. The plot of the novel reflects Croatian reality with many humorous twists that highlight the irony and absurd in the real world. Our paper presents an analysis of the novel, which includes the plot full of unexpected and seemingly surreal (but very probable) events. The analysis also includes the characters, especially the way they talk. The focus is thus put on the language – the detached, sometimes ironic language of the narrator, and on the picturesque variants of the Croatian language used by the protagonists, one of the variants being a very clever linguistic construct. Our analysis draws on various theories of humour and discussions about it (Bergson1900, Freud 1905, Bakhtin 1965, Propp 1976, Zergollern- Miletić 1990). Literature on humour is rich and diverse and encompasses various aspects of humour, such as irony, grotesque, black humour, etc. The first theoretical approach to humour is ascribed to Plato, and ever since then humour has tickled the minds of writers, philosophers and other thinkers. In the 20th century psychologists and linguists came to the forefront of humour research. Our analysis of Baretić's novel is based primarily on linguistic approaches to humour (Raskin 1985, Attardo 1994, Brône, Feyaers and Veale 2015). In the last three decades findings within the field of cognitive linguistics have been widely used in humour research (Giora 1991, 2001 ; Coulson 2001, 2003 ; Kyratzis 2003 ; Brône and Feyaerts 2004, to name only a few). Another linguistic approach offering explanation of the processes involved in humour creation and interpretation is the General Theory of Verbal Humour, whose main proponent is Salvatore Attardo. In our analysis we will make use of both theories to explain the humour in Baretić’s novel, hoping not to ruin the humorous effects that the author succeeded to create. We decided to embark on this research project because, to our knowledge, modern linguistic approaches to humour have not yet been used to analyse any Croatian literary text.

Izvorni jezik
Engleski

Znanstvena područja
Filologija

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