I Celebrating Life: Joy, Laughter, Mirth, Amusement, the Smile of the Soul -- The Feast of Life, Joy, and Love: The Laughter and Smile of the Soul -- The Merchant of Venice: A Triumph of Discrepancy and Mirth -- The Smile of the Mind: From Molière to Marivaux -- Reveries of Well-Being in the Shihp'in: From Psychology to Ontology -- Bergsonian Laughter in Bernard Shaw's Back to Methuselah -- G. Cabrera Infante and Lewis Carroll: The Aesthetics of Laughter in Contemporary Latin-American Literature -- Bracketing Theory in Leonardo's Five Grotesque Heads -- II Aesthetics of the Comic -- Not Funny: Metaphor, Dream and Decapitation -- Exploring Aesthetic Discomfort in the Experience of the Comic and the Tragic: John Marston's Antonio and Mellida and Antonio's Revenge -- Cannon Aspirin: Wallace Stevens' Defense of Pleasure -- The Comedy of the False Apperception: Wilde, Maugham, and Stoppard -- Irony as a Phenomenological Technique -- III The Circuits of Laughter -- Philosophy, Literature, and Laughter: Notes on an Ontology of the Moment -- Comic Rhythms in Leonardo da Vinci -- Plastic Expression and Intuition of Being in Paul Tillich's Theology -- Laughter and Enjoyment: La Fontaine and Fragonard -- IV Laughter and Aesthetic Enjoyment -- Endgame: Beckett's Oriental Subtext and the Prison of Consciousness -- Language and Enjoyment - Heidegger and Eliot -- T. S. Eliot and Metaphysical Laughter: A Phenomenology of Reading -- Joyless Laughter: Sophocles - Hesse - Beckett -- V Creative Perspectives of Enjoyment -- Inter-Relation Between Music and Literature and Between Silence and Music in the Novels by J. M. G. Le Clézio -- The Unbearable Lightness of Being: Entr'Acte as Comedic Interlude -- Lu Xun's Allegory of Realism: Psychology and the Aims of Writing -- Naissance du Poème, Naissance au Poème: La Fabrique du Pré de Francis Ponge -- Index of Names.