Relational Forms XI will welcome proposals for 20-minute papers in English responding to the above. Suggested (merely indicative) topics include:

• laughter, ethics and politics: literary and artistic modernity
• laughter, ethics and politics: the literary and artistic past
• satire: laughter as punishment
• irony: laughter, indirection and ambiguity
• ‘no laughing matter’: authority and the repression of verbal or visual creations
• laughter and the traditions of public entertainment: street, stage, screens
• laughter, authorship and authority
• remembering Swift: satire, didacticism and saeva indignatio