Article Dans Une Revue Études britanniques contemporaines - Revue de la Société dʼétudes anglaises contemporaines Année : 2016

Laughing Out Loud with Jonathan Coe: A Conversation

Résumé

The interview was conducted by Vanessa Guignery, Laurent Mellet and Catherine Pesso-Miquel. This conversation with Jonathan Coe took place at the École Normale Supérieure deLyon on 15 October 2015. Part of the discussion focuses on Coe’s fictional productionand part of it draws from essays included in Marginal Notes, Doubtful Statements.Non-Fiction, 1990-2013, a collection which contains pieces about such comic or satiricalwriters as Henry Fielding, Jonathan Swift, Laurence Sterne, B.S. Johnson, AlasdairGray and David Nobbs, as well as musicians and film directors. The book comprisesreflections on Coe’s art of writing but also on comedy, humour, satire and laughter,more specifically in the essays entitled ‘What is so Funny about Comic Novels?’ and ‘TheParadox of Satire’. In one of them, Coe remembers his childhood when laughter was‘something that drew people together … something shared’, when it ‘forged bonds ofsympathy between people, among friends and among families’. This sense of acommunity of laughter corresponds to what Benjamin notices in The Rotters’ Clubwhen he watches The Morecambe and Wise Show on television with his family and realises that millions of families must be laughing at the same joke at the same time,and that, as a consequence, ‘the entire nation was being briefly, fugitively drawntogether in the divine act of laughter’ (274). The aim of the interview is to explore this‘act of laughter’ as well as the particulars of satire and comedy in Coe’s fictional work.

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hal-04861525 , version 1 (02-01-2025)

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Vanessa Guignery. Laughing Out Loud with Jonathan Coe: A Conversation. Études britanniques contemporaines - Revue de la Société dʼétudes anglaises contemporaines, 2016, 51, ⟨10.4000/ebc.3371⟩. ⟨hal-04861525⟩
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