A Comic Vision of Great Constancy

Since ancient times people have recognized a pattern of experience and a quality of mind that attend the survival and the prospering of individuals, their families, and their nations. They called the linking of these things wisdom. In addition, the ancients observed that wisdom belongs to everyone born into this world as an innate potential. For that potential to be realized, though, they understood that human beings require a structure to help them recognize an experience as the voice of wisdom. A Comic Vision argues that comedy provides that structure and embodies that voice. There’s always a need for this. As Homer did before them, Chaucer and Shakespeare have constructed a poetic vehicle that functions like an ark for transporting its living cargo through perilous floods, and it’s as well-built and seaworthy as any we are like to know.

Alan Griesinger graduated from Trin- ity College in Hartford, Connecticut and received his MA in English from the University of Oregon. Following graduation, he taught junior and se- nior high students at Naples Central School in Naples, New York for twen- ty-eight years. For those who would like to learn the basics in the art of teaching, he highly recommends working with junior high students which is what he did exclusively for ten years. On the eleventh year, the administration asked him to teach the advanced placement course of- fered to seniors. This change sparked a renaissance for him in the teaching of literature. A Comic Vision derives from the work of those years.

“A lifetime of teaching and examining Chaucer’s and Shakespeare’s great comic works has given Alan Griesinger a wonderful comic vision of his own. This book is a lyrical and profound exploration of the nature and vision of comedy, a pleasure to read.”

– Brooke Allen, author of Moral Minority, Artistic License, and Twentieth-Century Attitudes

“Alan Griesinger takes the reader on an enchanting voyage of literary rediscovery, restoring comedy to its high Chaucerian and Shakespearean vocation as a vision of lost unity. A Comic Vision elegantly shows that comedy is no laughing matter but, on the contrary, that it challenges us to give local habitation and a name to life’s most engaging mysteries.”

– Roger Kimball, editor and publisher of The New Criterion