Laughing Matter: Phenomenological Takes on the Mind/Body Problem in Ulysses and Early Cinema.

Modernity, with its automobiles, recording devices, and mechanical methods of production, threatened to divorce the mind from the body by transforming the human organism into a machine, either through workers' increasingly automaton-like body movements or through the supersession of human input by mechanical input. This threat impelled modernists to reconsider the seemingly rigid machine/human and mind/body binaries. This article argues that certain modern writers, thinkers, and film-professionals (James Joyce, Henri Bergson, Charlie Chaplin, Georges M?li?s) used comedy as a way of thinking through these twin binaries. While the work of both Joyce and the film-makers clearly parallels Bergson's anti-Cartesian laughter theory, ultimately, these works anticipate Maurice Merleau-Ponty's later phenomenological ideas, particularly the concept of 'body-subjects', of humans as neither purely mechanical, nor solely cerebral, as a mixture of subjectivity and corporeality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]