Papers by Cynthia Willett
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
ABSTRACTThe function of the comic in the midst of tragedy is not clear. After all, is it simply c... more ABSTRACTThe function of the comic in the midst of tragedy is not clear. After all, is it simply comic relief that wounded nations, communities, or individuals seek? Tragedy has long been cast as memory and mourning while comedy offers for the masses a Nietzschean moment of joyful forgetting and for the Stoic mind a measure of transcendence from our grief. The latter view came into prominence for modern American culture with the nineteenth-century satirist Mark Twain, who wrote that “the secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow,” which has been interpreted through the often-quoted formula: comedy is tragedy plus time. The assumption is that we need some distance emotionally in order to mock or transcend the tragic. While we grant the humor of transcendence can produce some momentary relief through emotional distance, we wonder if there might be another way that humor can deal with suffering? Popular psychology often speaks of five stages of grief, and while that progressio...
Interspecies Ethics, 2014
The Soul of Justice, 2018
Contemporary Political Theory, 2020
Political comedy, whether it is in the form of an entertainment news show, meme, cartoon or even ... more Political comedy, whether it is in the form of an entertainment news show, meme, cartoon or even when a comedian uses their set to focus on a political issue has become ubiquitous in the past 20 years. This is not just an American phenomenon. Countries worldwide have their own political comedy shows. Comedians who confront authority have been elected to office. A sense of humor is now seen as a requirement on campaign trails. We suggest that comedy's dominance in popular
Animal Sentience, 2019
Is the mirror a reliable indicator of self-awareness for any species, whether sheep or human? Tak... more Is the mirror a reliable indicator of self-awareness for any species, whether sheep or human? Taking a cue from feminist, phenomenological, and cross-cultural philosophy, a relational self rather than a reflective one might better capture what is at stake for the lives of social animals and for science.
By the early twentieth-first century across the U.S. cultural and political landscape, the comic,... more By the early twentieth-first century across the U.S. cultural and political landscape, the comic, building on a rich legacy, has become our truth teller. 4 From late-night television shows such as those hosted by Stephen Colbert and Trevor Noah to stand-up performances at New York's Muslim Funny Fest, humor is not merely for escape but also a way to handle our gut instincts and to get to the guts of an issue. Yet we know that conventionally audiences expect laughter to serve as mere amusement. We also know that under the cover of amusement, toxic jokes turning on race, Islamophobia, homophobia, or misogyny and rape are used as a tool of oppression We are grateful to the many scholars, colleagues, and friends who helped to shape the development of our project, whether they know it
Critical Philosophy of Race, 2014
Like lynching and other mass hysterias, xenophobia exemplifies a contagious, collective wave of e... more Like lynching and other mass hysterias, xenophobia exemplifies a contagious, collective wave of energy and hedonic quality that can point toward a troubling unpredictability at the core of political and social systems. While earlier studies of mass hysteria and popular discourse assume that cooler heads (aka rational individuals with their logic) could and should regain control over those emotions that are deemed irrational, and that boundaries are assumed healthy only when intact, affect studies pose individuals as nodes of biosocial networks larger than themselves. Thus rather than suggesting that the individual can only prevent societal harm by gaining command and patrolling the borders of an autonomous self, we embrace the notion that affects can exert a positive and transformative force on a social reality that is resistant to top-down policy intervention and any straightforward moral or logical plea.
Oxford Handbooks Online, 2017
Our allegiance to individualism sanctions the insult, with or without humor, to a significant ext... more Our allegiance to individualism sanctions the insult, with or without humor, to a significant extent through free speech rights. But what if the sting of symbolic aggression––as seemingly minor as an insult dressed up in the pleasantries of a joke––in fact accounts in many instances for the more acute pain of the physical assault? To be sure, physical assaults can harm material well-being. But what if a dimension of violence cannot be understood apart from the cruelty of the joke or the sting of ridicule? What if a shaming insult constitutes the significant sting of racial discrimination or sexual assault?
Difficulties of Ethical Life, 2008
Radical Philosophy Review, 2007
Auslegung: a Journal of Philosophy, 1983
Published in 1995 by Routledge 29 West 35th Street New York, NY 10001 Published in Great Britain ... more Published in 1995 by Routledge 29 West 35th Street New York, NY 10001 Published in Great Britain in 1995 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane London EC4P4EE Copyright © 1995 by Routledge Printed in the United States of America Design: Jack Donner All rights reserved. No part ...
Philosophy and Literature, 1990
The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 2010
What a pleasure to have such subtle thinkers and scholars as Bill Martin and Andrew Cutrofello re... more What a pleasure to have such subtle thinkers and scholars as Bill Martin and Andrew Cutrofello reflect on the relation of irony and comedy to politics and philosophy through their commentary on my new book. To set the tone, Martin begins with a koan, or a parody of one, What if a ...
The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 2008
The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 2008
In an essay for the New York Times magazine this past summer, the accomplished short story writer... more In an essay for the New York Times magazine this past summer, the accomplished short story writer Carolyn Ferrell (2007) refl ects back on her student days. Ferrell attended an exclusive college but as a "poor brown-skinned girl from the wrong side of Long Island." To help with expenses she took a summer job as a cook's assistant at the estate of a wealthy white woman. The day she arrived, the maid quit, and her job expanded to fourteen-hour days but with no pay increase. Ferrell could not bring herself to protest. Nothing terribly egregious occurred during the rest of the summer, no blatant racial taunts or unwanted sexual advances; but the conditions of her employment nonetheless tapped into a partly intangible legacy of race and class tensions with vast consequences. "My Employer was frequently gone from the estate," Ferrell writes, but "I could feel the polite disdain of her gaze upon me at all times-while ironing her expensive blouses with lavender perfume, for instance." After two months Ferrell quit her job, and she did not see her employer again until some years later while on the way for a stay at the Barn, Edward Albee's artists' colony. The former employer warmly embraced her onetime employee and, after hearing of Ferrell's many accomplishments, invited her to come by the house, adding that she "could use some extra help in the kitchen." Ferrell writes that she "looked into [those] cheery eyes and stood there helpless and humiliated: the old defeat still lay heavy in my bones" (2007, 54). Old habits of response and bone-weary memories that are both personal and collective are the subject of Shannon Sullivan's important new book, Revealing Whiteness: The Unconscious Habits of Racial Privilege. The book confronts those subtle aspects of white privilege that render whites complicit with a system of racial oppression that many of us might aim to oppose. This exposure of a disavowed complicity is not an easy undertaking. In contrast to the self-professed ideologies of racial superiority that have propped up Jim Crow and slavery, white privilege functions for the most part as an invisible fi eld of force even if it shares many of the same aims. In order to theorize this oppressive force, Sullivan draws on refl ections of Dewey, DuBois, Fanon, and Jane Addams, as well as contemporary fi gures such as Patricia Williams and Jean Laplanche.
The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 2010
Ladelle McWhorter&#x27;s new book claims to be a specific analysis of two aspects of oppressi... more Ladelle McWhorter&#x27;s new book claims to be a specific analysis of two aspects of oppression in Anglo-Americaracism and sexuality. In fact the book is much more. It is a powerful fact-based philosophical epic of oppression in Anglo-America along its two central axesracism and ...
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Papers by Cynthia Willett