The gesture of laughing : a comparative study of the fascination and dissatisfaction with laughter during the long nineteenth century

Over the past decades, research on laughter in literary studies has often prioritized the modernist period (1900–1945). Moving away from modernist literature, I analyze how a wide range of nineteenth-century English, French, and German-language texts—scientific treatises on chemistry, physiognomy and emotions, encyclopedic entries and philosophical essays, a novel and novellas—conceive and approach laughter. The dissertation offers close readings of Humphry Davy’s research on nitrous oxide (1800); Duchenne de Boulogne’s and Charles Darwin’s works on human expressions (1862; 1872); Karl Julius Weber’s and Charles Baudelaire’s essays on laughter (1842; 1855); Fritz Mauthner’s writings (1903–1924); Victor Hugo’s L’homme qui rit (1869); and Thomas Mann’s early prose (1893–8). Each chapter identifies a specific configuration of laughter—as overpowering automatism, interesting image, granular object, melodramatic gesture, and vitalist symbol—and shows how nineteenth-century discussions of laughter engage with discursive and technological developments, including experimental research in chemistry, the evidentiary and explanatory promise of technical images with photography, evolutionary theory, fin-de-siècle language skepticism, melodrama and vitalism. Guided by Vilém Flusser’s theory of gestures, I argue these various conceptions respond to a recognition of laughter as a gesture defined by a threatening elusiveness, which is legible in the texts and in their reception. This understanding of laughter as gesture motivates different strategies of management, including attempts to decode laughter via photography and text; explain it away via taxonomical classifications; and the literary control of laughter via dichotomies and techniques of clarity of the melodrama. These strategies and their failure to explain away the object place laughter in a feedback loop between critical attention and dissatisfaction, which then perpetuates its circulation as a gesture demanding attention and eluding capture. The study concludes that laughter proves generative, fascinating and frustrating, because it is treated, across a wide range of disciplinary interventions, as a lever for defining new technologies, emerging disciplines, epistemological crises, or the intended interpretation of a text. In this way, the dissertation positions these nineteenth-century texts as distinctive moments in the cultural history of laughter.