“LAUGHING ALL THE WAY”: LAUGHTER AND IDENTITY IN KARAMZIN’S LETTERS OF A RUSSIAN TRAVELER.

Most theories of laughter explore its social function, locating humor in the operations of social protest or reconciliation. My focus is on the role of humor and laughter within a given text, in the construction of literary identities. Karamzin’s Letters of a Russian Traveler is particularly suited to my analysis, first, in depicting a complex narrative persona who must adapt to laughter without comprising his dual identity as a Sentimentalist and a Russian with a national agenda. The Letters exemplify the struggle to reconcile these personae’s sense of the ethic and social functions of laughter with the Sentimentalist aesthetic code. Moreover, unlike the sentimental tale, the travelogue is a genre with its own history of employing laughter as a marker of difference. Thus, Karamzin’s Letters vacillate between the Sentimentalist school’s resistance to laughter and the travelogue’s reliance on it. Through a series of episodes involving laughter, Karamzin works out a certain understanding of laughter’s functions for a traveler, a Sentimentalist, and a Russian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]