The Contemporary Comic Novel

Sanctioned scorn, absurdity, glee, happy endings, success of dubious ventures, new results from old causes—these are some of the pleasures comedy offers. The novels in this course—A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, White Noise by Don DeLillo, On Beauty by Zadie Smith, and Swamplandia! by Karen Russell, offer all these abundantly, as well as breaches of decorum and extravagant situations, not to mention wit. We look into how these novels play with some important norms that traditionally safeguard the moral value of fiction—plausible action and likeable characters chiefly—to discover how comedy illicitly makes wrong things right, in a way readers approve of and admire.