Elena Tacheva

Laugh in the School Discourse of the Renaissance – Functions, Uses, Literary Reflections

The Bulgarian Renaissance develops in a cultural system that we can define as a school culture. The Renaissance laugh exists as a fragment of cultural continuity in the discourses of the school culture. This is a fragment that is maximum filled up with cultural and informative potential. This fragment confirms the maxim that the culture itself reflects the cultural laugh.

There are two main characteristics of the laugh in the Bulgarian culture in the 19th century: to institutionalize and to be institutional. The understanding of the Renaissance institutionalism of the laugh is explained mainly through the social significance of the laugh that is submitted in Henri Bergson’s essay “Le Rire”.

The analysis is concentrated on three main components of the school culture: the school as a basic institutional form; the teacher as a person who concentrated a large part of the institutional authority and the pupil as a basic object of this authority and its potential subject.

The school of the Renaissance has the strict procedures (ideological, legal and ritual) to drive out the laugh from the school space. In this paper they are explained through the two directions: textbooks of good behavior (Christoitii) and the system of school punishments. The laugh not only exists in the school discourse but it has normative and culture shaping functions in spite of the many obstacles the Bulgarian society of 19th century creates.

There is interest in laugh appropriation by the Renaissance school. This is explained through the development of the school comedy. The author analyses the school comedy “Daskal Genko” and she uncovered the carnival figure of the Christian rite “poruganie”. The appearance of this comedy is discussed as a border in the history of the Renaissance culture. It is an aesthetic sign of destruction of the specific cultural space that supports the school culture.