Grotesque Anatomies is a study of Menippean satire in English since the Renaissance. It consists of revisionist, close readings of canonical works such as Eliots The Waste Land and Popes Dunciad ...among others, and investigates how identifying them as Menippean satires changes our understanding of them. The initial chapter offers a comprehensive account of the form from antiquity to the present day, identifying its bifurcated development in the shorter form (Seneca-Lucian-Julian) and the long.
Political humour is employed to define the boundaries between opposing political groups and to express discontent against politicians and political acts. The sociopolitical context of its production ...and circulation not only influences its form, content, functions, and targets, but also determines whether it will be accepted, banned, or manipulated to serve the political agendas of certain groups. Hence, political humour becomes a ritual site where political identities are constantly constructed and (re)negotiated. Drawing on studies coming from different sociocultural communities, the authors underline the variety of humorous genres and communicative functions related to political humour, while they point out that humour research needs to look beyond the metapragmatic stereotype often surrounding the use of humour in politics.
The present study introduces eight
(i.e., fun, humor, nonsense, wit, irony, satire, sarcasm, and cynicism) and examines the validity of a set of 48 marker items for their assessment, the Comic Style ...Markers (CSM). These styles were originally developed to describe literary work and are used here to describe individual differences. Study 1 examines whether the eight styles can be distinguished empirically, in self- and other-reports, and in two languages. In different samples of altogether more than 1500 adult participants, the CSM was developed and evaluated with respect to internal consistency, homogeneity, test-retest reliability, factorial validity, and construct and criterion validity. Internal consistency was sufficiently high, and the median test-retest reliability over a period of 1-2 weeks was 0.86 (
= 148). Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses showed that the eight styles could be distinguished in both English- (
= 303) and German-speaking samples (
= 1018 and 368). Comparing self- and other-reports (
= 210) supported both convergent and discriminant validity. The intercorrelations among the eight scales ranged from close to zero (between humor and sarcasm/cynicism) to large and positive (between sarcasm and cynicism). Consequently, second-order factor analyses revealed either two bipolar factors (based on ipsative data) or three unipolar factors (based on normative data). Study 2 related the CSM to instruments measuring personality (
= 999), intelligence (
= 214), and character strengths (
= 252), showing that (a) wit was the only style correlated with (verbal) intelligence, (b) fun was related to indicators of vitality and extraversion, (c) humor was related to character strengths of the heart, and (d) comic styles related to mock/ridicule (i.e., sarcasm, cynicism, but also irony) correlated negatively with character strengths of the virtues temperance, transcendence, and humanity. By contrast, satire had a moral goodness that was lacking in sarcasm and cynicism. Most importantly, the two studies revealed that humor might be related to a variety of character strengths depending on the comic style utilized, and that more styles may be distinguished than has been done in the past. The CSM is recommended for future explorations and refinements of comic styles.
The Power of Satire Meijer Drees, Marijke; de Leeuw, Sonja
2015, 2015-10-22
eBook
Satire is clearly one of today's most controversial socio-cultural topics. In this edited volume, The Power of Satire, it is studied for the first time as a dynamic, discursive mode of performance ...with the power of crossing and contesting cultural boundaries. The collected essays reflect the fundamental shift from literary satire or straightforward literary rhetoric with a relatively limited societal impact, to satire's multi-mediality in the transnational public space where it can cause intercultural clashes and negotiations on a large scale. An appropriate set of heuristic themes - space, target, rhetoric, media, time - serves as the analytical framework for the investigations and determines the organization of the book as a whole. The contributions, written by an international group of experts with diverse disciplinary backgrounds, manifest academic standards with a balance between theoretical analyses and evaluations on the one hand, and in-depth case studies on the other.
L’œuvre poétique de Dôvy est créée à partir de la poésie orale tsimihety. Elle quête de surprise en exploitant le flot d’image et de symboles tirés de la nature et de la société malgache pour ...transmettre un message sur d’un fait social. Sa poésie n’est plus donc déclamée comme dans son stade oral. L’objectif de cet article est de démonter la beauté de mode d’expression poétique de ce poète à partir de l'intertextualité de son œuvre avec le proverbe. Comment peut-on dégager la beauté de l’intertextualité de ces deux genres poétiques ? La beauté de son œuvre se trouve au niveau satirique par son usage de la métaphore et de l’image ironique qui amène son public dans une harmonie créée par le rire, car la poésie se mêle entre le vrai et la vraie semblance. Alors que dans l’aspect poétique de son œuvre, le poète essaie à impliquer son public passif contre la malhonnêteté et l’injustice sociale dans son pays.
Social media can be a double-edged sword for political misinformation, either a conduit propagating false rumors through a large population or an effective tool to challenge misinformation. To ...understand this phenomenon, we tracked a comprehensive collection of political rumors on Twitter during the 2012 US presidential election campaign, analyzing a large set of rumor tweets (n = 330,538). We found that Twitter helped rumor spreaders circulate false information within homophilous follower networks, but seldom functioned as a self-correcting marketplace of ideas. Rumor spreaders formed strong partisan structures in which core groups of users selectively transmitted negative rumors about opposing candidates. Yet, rumor rejecters neither formed a sizable community nor exhibited a partisan structure. While in general rumors resisted debunking by professional fact-checking sites (e.g. Snopes), this was less true of rumors originating with satirical sources.
Describing the historical development of the mask ( Laarve)
2
within the carnival tradition of the Basel Fasnacht ( Faasnacht, Switzerland) during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this ...article offers a case study of the so-called reflexive turn in late modern (‘post-traditional’) societies. Drawing on the concept of ritual reflexivity, we argue that the gradual development of the Fasnacht masks into oversized constructions covering the ritualist's whole head ( Laarve) went hand in hand with the development of various other ritual mechanisms aimed at facilitating within the ritual framework a meditative, inward-oriented stance ( enstasis).
3
This is especially interesting as carnivals tend to be associated with precisely the opposite dynamics: transcending social norms through the celebration of excess and inebriation which, in its extreme forms, may lead to ekstasis (or at least a headache). The described ritual elements are interpreted as a series of mirroring mechanisms nested within one another. The ritual handling of the Laarve by the ritualists (its donning and taking off at regular intervals) is then understood simultaneously as a facilitator and a marker fuelling and isolating individual phases of an otherwise non-discrete reflexive process. Based on first-hand accounts of ritualists’ experiences of mask-wearing, we will show how Basel Fasnacht walks a tightrope between ‘modelling’ and ‘mirroring’ societal, communal and idiosyncratic levels of meaning-making.
Roman satire Hooley, Daniel M
2008., 2007, 2008-04-15, 20070109
eBook
This compact and critically up-to-date introduction to Roman satire examines the development of the genre, focusing particularly on the literary and social functionality of satire. It considers why ...it was important to the Romans and why it still matters. Provides a compact and critically up-to-date introduction to Roman satire
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