Humor book, volume 1

Everyday Analysis for which we use the author name EDA Collective is a group of writers, mostly in Manchester, in the UK, who have been posting short articles on everyday events, phenomena, affairs, popular and avant garde culture, and anything else, online at http: Our work has been shared by various outlets over the internet, from Verso Books to the poet, Sam Riviere, with certain articles also appearing in our weekly column in the country's biggest University newspaper, The Mancunion. The Everyday Analysis Collective is one of the answers to my inability to reconcile my adulthood with my childlike attraction to the insane minutiae of daily life and popular culture.

That EDA has taken off in less than eighteen months is impressive, and something that I think is sorely and amusingly needed.

Why are Animals Funny? || Zero Books || Book Info

They are short, averaging approximately two pages per entry, and each title almost reads like something off of an early Fall Out Boy or Panic! At the Disco album, less a suggestive title than a brief, yet detailed account: Indeed, the introduction to the book is the longest single entry in the entire thing, and offers a good explanation of not only the critical inspiration for the project, but also offers reasoning as to exactly why this project is so.

The second half of the introduction, subtitled A Defence of Theory, explains this well. Like a literary two-way street, this book acts as an accessible inlet for outsiders of the ivory tower that is academia, and a much-needed outlet for those trapped inside both students and accomplished instructors alike. In brief, it serves to ponder all aspects of cultural minutiae through pickings and choosings of theoretical heavy-hitters like Lacan and Marx, without removing the joy of the sheer insanity and absurdity of it all.

This might actually shed light on what I think is really the only unfair part of the whole thing: Of course, this is also one of the most appealing points of the project. For most, anything more than an introductory analysis to say, American food challenges we Americans do find an unabashed sense of joy in this sort of thing even without seeing it though a lens that infantilizes this variety of consumption, as is suggested in entry number three: This ends up acting more as an exercise for the reader than for the authors.

The authors present the situation and the initial thought. At first stop, a likely answer to the question-title could be something akin to: One was a real live human being, the other was a character on a television show. Without personal experience to speak of, the author suggests, the character was just as real as the actor and vice versa. The essay as a whole manages itself quite well for its length, and was probably the only entry where I found myself largely satisfied at its conclusion instead of clamouring for more. To say nothing else, I would recommend the book on the basis of this entry alone.

There is a slight deceptiveness at work with the format of the book however, and one could start to think with the project in general. As a burgeoning academic, this format makes sense to me. But the project, broadly operated by academics, relies on academic vernacular to claim its stake. It thereby almost restricts its accessibility to a very specialized type of mind.

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The average individual is not likely to be terribly familiar with Benjamin or Derrida, but this book could in fact ultimately serve as a useful way of piquing interest in the new and unfamiliar. Quite a bit can be said to the simple fact that in the span of less than two years, it has managed to achieve a shift in physical status from the digitally-pervasive, to being blessed with its first ISBN. This is probably what I looked like while I purposefully read the book in various public settings: The Call Centre and Alienating Advertising. Their critiques, averaging two pages each, magnify to an unsightly degree the linguistic, social, and cultural constructions we live in, how this reality functions onto us, and then ends each article with an always all too human provocation.

That is their method. It is sharp and it penetrates.

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And unlike Zizek, there are very few: Each of the 46 articles can stand alone in this way. And what I mean by this, is that the hot-pink cover with a cat on it, the short articles, and the hilarious quips, will not be found anywhere in the buttoned-up, stuffy University air of today. It is best read on the train, at Starbucks, or in a crowded park. You will get the full empirical experience of the theory this way.

The articles will come to life in a Frankensteinian-way, and whether that is frightening or hilarious is, I guess up to you. I think it was Wittgenstein who said that the only way to confront something truly awful is through humor. Moments like these that go that unquestioned everyday are thrown under the microscope, and everything becomes implicated in a massive web. Language, culture, sociostructures, the body, the mind, and most importantly, you, just another fly stuck on the web, reading this review on the internet, are implicated, yes, whether you like it or not you are in on it.

They want to make us think, and constantly re-think our reality, a reality that is full of impossible complexities: To this end, their goal, as simple as it is, is hard to achieve. But they do achieve it. I think these renegades attack this challenge in the best possible way, and that is from the multi-vantage point that only a collective can offer, a panoramic view of different voices, that see different signs, objects, and symbols, and amalgamate them together in a creative register, that makes for a delightful and engaging read.

I had no idea what in the hell a Toastie was, beyond being a a boring grilled cheese. I guess the best way to describe it is — its a kind of shit Panini. The career prospects for young academics, especially in the humanities, are dire. But the barriers to full-time, long-term contracts for young thinkers across the British Isles have in some cases bred creativity.

The daring of young thought is still potentially as invigorating as in decades past. The problem is that the academy has little space for risk taking. Universities are restricted more and more by unadventurous business models. And their timidity is reflected in their often conservative choices when funding research by young scholars. Yet rare beacons of young dissenting voices persist and adapt to this inhospitable climate. Those who operate on the margins of traditional publishing, paradoxically, are starting to represent the cutting edge of the academy.

These are writers who are hungry to continue the healthy tradition of new thinkers who challenge the status quo. Their trick is to make more accessible highbrow theories of gender, ideology and the postmodern in order to influence public debate. Readers may be familiar with one of these collectives, the Everyday Sexism movement, but perhaps fewer will have taken note of Everyday Analysis or EDA for short. The latter has gained a number of admirers in more niche circles.

EDA embraces the internet as a primary platform of publication and has mobilised in new ways to stand out from the countless young academics with whom it must compete for attention. It publishes almost weekly — a significant challenge to the slower and more traditional forms of academic publishing. The collective organisation of EDA counters refreshingly the narcissism in other words, the individualism of more mainstream scholarly writing.

Perhaps counterintuitively for a medium that allows us more and more to curate our own virtual lives, at least some of the narcissistic tendencies of academic writing are eradicated if the work appears online and is authored collectively: The collective, in turn, may take the intellectual high ground over the superstar academic; the introduction to Why Are Animals Funny? The numerous readings presented here meticulously pay respect to the work of theorists and philosophers such as Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin and Slavoj Zizek.

Food are just some of the subjects reframed by Why Are Animals Funny? This is not just the posturing of the disenfranchised.

Translation, Humour and Literature

At its astute best, Why Are Animals Funny? Following the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan, EDA insists we should embrace rather than dismiss our unique quirks and habits: Drawing from Zizek, EDA asks us to consider that which economic charity smudges over: We should see charity as necessary only because of the inhumanity of the capitalist structures that necessitate it.

It is not only a desire for change that drives the writers of EDA but also intoxication with the theoretical text. Delia Chiaro has assembled a unique array of experts to reflect on the challenges of translating humour. Volume one is replete with examples and practical advice from masterly translators but it is also that rare thing - a scholarly book about humour that is itself humorous. It instructs while it entertains. From Michael Ewans' recapturing of Aristophanic satire's original shock-value and Marguerite Wells' lively account of matching the Japanese tally of 27 synonyms for "prostitute", to the insights afforded by Christie Davies' "translations" of Scottish religious jokes into other varieties of English and Walter Redfern's self-discoveries in the process of creating French and Spanish versions of a poem to his father, this book illuminates both the nature of translation and of humour.

The second volume will be eagerly awaited.

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