Jean Lee Cole. 2020. How the Other Half Laughs: The Comic Sensibility in American Culture, 1895–1920. Jackson, MS: Mississippi University Press, 214 pp., 63 illustr., $ 112.00.

Abstract

Abstract Adrian Duncan’s second novel A Sabbatical in Leipzig (2020) marks a departure from ‘typical’ Irish topics such as national identity and religion. This he shares with a range of contemporary Irish authors, particularly those writing in the aftermath of the Celtic-Tiger years. The novel’s focus on architecture and engineering, which also looms large in Duncan’s other novels Love Notes from a German Building Site and The Geometer Lobachevsky, is unique, as it leads to unusual reflections on the nature of material culture. This original approach to the novel form should be considered as part of the current international trend to integrate theoretical reflections on a wide range of topics, thus negotiating contemporary cultures of knowledge. The novel’s international outlook moves away from ‘typical’ Irish topics of national identity and religion shared by a wider range of contemporary Irish authors, particularly those writing in the aftermath of the Celtic-Tiger years. The novel is thus also a reflection on the collapse of old systems, be they political, social, or epistemological, and the existential uncertainty created by their demise. I argue in my paper that Duncan’s novel addresses questions of knowledge formation that bear a striking resemblance to the Romantic novel as an open and generically hybrid form. I read it in a wider context as part of an ongoing experience of crisis: my overall thesis aims at describing the contemporary tendency to include abstract reflections that interrupt the narrative sequence as an expression of a fundamental crisis of knowledge. Today’s mediascape represents the contemporary world in a state of severe emergency, whose symptoms, be they climate change, the rise of nationalism and the far right, ultimately lead to a fundamental experience of contingency. Novels like Duncan’s can thus be seen as an expression of the crisis of the contemporary media ecology of knowledge.