Jan 5, 2010

You Can't Take It with You | Topics for Further Study

Look up a classic discussion of comedy—such as Aristotle's Poetics, Charles Baudelaire's On the Essence of Laughter, Sigmund Freud's Jokes and the Comic, or Northrop Frye's The Mythos of Spring: Comedy—and evaluate the form and content of You Can't Take It with You according to your chosen theorist's definition of comedy.

Read either Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay "Self-Reliance" (1841) or the chapter "Economy" from Henry David Thoreau's Walden...