Contemporary Satire Research Articles

Dark Humor: Satire, the Baroque, and the Carnivalesque in Patricia Schonstein’s Banquet at Brabazan and Ingrid Winterbach’s The Elusive Moth

Both Patricia Schonstein’s Banquet at Brabazan and Ingrid Winterbach’s The Elusive Moth contain an element of baroque fantasy, and in Schonstein’s case the makings of a contemporary satire. They also exhibit the tension between the comic and the tragic, the city and the platteland, between flights of imagination and the magnetic pull of a dark social realism that both underpins and, in Schonstein’s case, sometimes undermines the work. This paper investigates the use of humor in writing against the grain of apartheid, and how successful these writers are at integrating history in a dynamic fiction. Published respectively in 1991 (Winterbach) and 2010 (Schonstein), these novels bracket the two decades that straddle the immediate pre- and post-apartheid era, and also question what constitutes the South African novel, as Schonstein grew up in the then Rhodesia, and Winterbach’s work was originally written in Afrikaans.

"People Have to Watch What They Say": What Horace, Juvenal, and 9/11 Can Tell Us about Satire and History

In days and weeks following attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001, related assault began on place of and satire in America's new post-9/11 culture. For example, on 18 September, Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter told news website Inside.com that America had reached the end of age of irony; on 21 September, Camille Dodero wrote in Boston Phoenix of end of unbridled irony for coddled generation that bathed itself in sarcasm; and on 24 September, in Time magazine editorial, Roger Rosenblatt also declared dead, its demise constituting the one good thing [that] could come from this horror. (1) Although small number of media pundits came to defense of irony, events in popular culture seemed to reflect accuracy of views of Carter and Rosenblatt, as many television productions that relied on ironic satire went temporarily (and, in at least one case, permanently) off air in face of wave of public animosity. The attack on ironic satire after 9/11 helps to illuminate one of most contentious theoretical issues surrounding genre: role of history in interpretation of satire. What is potentially useful to literary critic/historian about moments of intense cultural crisis is that such moments tend to make satire's 'historicity' (2) more readily apparent. Since satire unapologetically engages with things which men do (quidquid agunt homines) (3) as Juvenal (1.85) wrote, genre must invariably engage with profound shifts in cultural ethos in dialogic manner; however, it is when engagement turns to conflict during moments of crisis that satire is subjected to repression, and repressive response often provides illuminating details about nature of conflict between arbiters and critics of society. As one historical example, Annabel Patterson (1989, 83-4) describes Elizabethan government's effort to ban satire in politically unstable summer of 1599 as a struggle not only for popular imagination but also, obviously, for control of media by which that imagination was stimulated. Patterson's (1989, 86) contention that Elizabeth's government could not tolerate representational instability resonates with modern times as well. During heavily contested ministerial elections in Italy in 2006, for example, Prime Minister and media mogul Silvio Berlusconi invoked Italy's par conditio law, which ensures equal time for all political views, as means to prevent Italian comedians and satirists from deriding his administration on those television networks that were beyond his control. Satire's historicity and frequent desire to quell its unorthodox influence are recurring issues in cultural history; after all, if in actuality satire has little power to disturb political order, asks Dustin Griffin (1994, 153), then why have governments thought it important to control? The battle to control tenor of representations of social ethos is an inherently ideological battle as forces of authority work to maintain orthodoxies that sustain it by suppressing those who would undermine such orthodoxies. The repressive acrimony leveled at satire after 9/11 provides kind of case study of dynamics involved in dialogue between contemporary satire and historical change. The radical shifts in America's political, economic, and psychological climates of time both influenced and were influenced by prevalent modes of cultural criticism. Although space does not permit an exhaustive discussion of all factors involved in recent example of satire's historicity, broad outline may help to illuminate not only historicity of contemporary satire but that of Roman satire as well. Such comparison of contemporary America and ancient Rome is open to host of well-founded objections, yet comparison is made with such frequency as to merit serious consideration. …

Reforming the Fox: Spenser's "Mother Hubberds Tale," the Beast Fables of Barnabe Riche, and Adam Loftus, Archbishop of Dublin

Reforming the Fox:Spenser's "Mother Hubberds Tale," the Beast Fables of Barnabe Riche, and Adam Loftus, Archbishop of Dublin Thomas Herron Gluttonie, malice, pride, and covetizeAnd lawlesnes raigning with riotize;Besides the infinite extortions,Done through the Foxes great oppressions,That the complaints thereof could not be tolde. —"Prosopopoia. Or Mother Hubberds Tale," 1309–13.1 Political allegory thrives amid state secrecy and endemic corruption. At least two early modern authors, Edmund Spenser and his fellow radical Protestant reformer in Ireland, Barnabe Riche, wrote risqué allegories in order to promote harsh tactics as a means of cultural change. Unlike Soviet dissidents, to take one modern example, who promoted open-minded and/or democratic principles in the face of totalitarianism, Riche and Spenser took the opposite tack, using their shadowy allegories to promote more militant and authoritarian policies in their adopted country. Riche's richly allegorical Adventures of Brusanus (1592) and Greenes Newes both from Heaven and Hell (1593) lament the abuse of power by local magistrates and condemn the waffling of weak administrators. Spenser's satire "Prosopopoia. Or Mother Hubberds Tale" (1591) demands that London aggressively put an end to the power of moderate albeit highly corrupt governors of the realm, including [End Page 336] those among the queen's own Protestant clerical and civil appointees in Ireland. Spenser's political allegories readily bleed into each other, and English readers who appreciate his satires need not understand their Irish topicality. Nonetheless, "Mother Hubberds Tale" and its host-volume, the aptly titled Complaints (1591), are shaped by Spenser's increased desire for a militant Protestant solution in a highly corrupt Ireland, riven by factional politics and dominated by corrupt administrations. The crafty and hypocritical Fox in the first and fourth parts of the "Tale," it is argued here, primarily satirizes the Archbishop of Dublin and Armagh and Lord Chancellor of Ireland, Adam Loftus, rather than the Lord Treasurer of England, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, as previously understood. This identification of the Fox corresponds with similar contemporary satire of Loftus by Riche. It is in the context of attempted radical reform in and outside of the Dublin Pale in the late 1580s that we should understand the beast fables of both authors. Spenser and Riche demonstrate hostility toward those who, rightly or wrongly, failed to share the reforming spirit of their militant Protestant faction in the worst of times. This is not to say that Spenser held no republican fantasies for the eventual transformation of his adopted land.2 Rather, as in book 5 of The Faerie Queene, short-term necessity demanded that he celebrate the fertile magnificence and strong arm of the prince and her deputies in allegorical guise. The authority he opposed was corrupt and local, its solution authoritarian. Spenser's "Mother Hubberds Tale," when read in the context of contemporary and similarly disguised complaints by Riche, laments the decline of a once-staunch Protestant reformer, Loftus, into spiritual and worldly corruption and suggests that martial, not common law, is among the solutions to Ireland's malady. I Politics Spenser approached his colonial situation as administrator and planter with a starkly alternating pessimism and optimism based on experience, [End Page 337] a conviction that "evil" inhabited the world, and belief, a prophetic hope that it might one day be overthrown. On the optimistic side, Spenser's Faerie Queene makes his position in Ireland resonate with a universal central significance as a land to be labored over, protected, and made fertile by the great sun-goddess Queen Elizabeth I.3 Simultaneously, in what appears as a dynamic tension in his artistic vision, Spenser complains regularly about the world and Ireland in particular, comparing it often to an obscure and lawless wilderness ruled by petty tyrants. He does this in order to meditate on the state of the exiled Christian soul in a hostile or decentered world of confusing signs. Spenser's fascination with lapsed souls and corrupt civilization has as much to do with his fixation on inner states of savagery and Christian salvation as on actual savage conditions in the world, and we can appreciate how the stereotypical colonial images in his poetry, such as those describing the...

What is Black Theatre? The African-American Season at the Tricycle Theatre

Kobna Holdbrook-Smith was a member of the repertory company formed by artistic director Nicolas Kent for the 2005–2006 African-American season at the Tricycle Theatre in north London. That company also included Jenny Jules, Joseph Marcell, Lucian Msamati, Carmen Munroe, and Nathan Osgood. In Walk Hard – Talk Loud by Abram Hill, a play originally produced in 1944 and set in New York in the late 1930s, Holdbrook-Smith played a young boxer who faces racism. In Lynn Nottage's contemporary satire Fabulation, he took on dual roles – the heroine's husband who absconds with her wealth, and the gentle ex-junkie who offers her love. And in August Wilson's Gem of the Ocean, set in Pittsburgh in 1904, his Citizen Barlow seeks purification from the 285-year-old spiritual adviser Aunt Ester and is taken on a symbolic rite of passage. The Ghanaian-born Holdbrook-Smith also appeared at the Tricycle in 2004–2005 in Mustapha Matura's Playboy of the West Indies. Terry Stoller, who teaches at Baruch College in New York City and is working on a book project about the Tricycle Theatre, spoke with Holdbrook-Smith in June 2006 in Covent Garden, London.

Saturnalia. Juan de Salisbury y los Goliardos

The relation among the cultured satire of John of Salisbury and the popular contemporary satire of the goliards are studied, showing the affinities and differences between them.

Sometimes Funny, but Most Times Deadly Serious: Amiri Baraka as Political Satirist

Smash and bludgeon forty-one times a day Tie him to a tree in front of city hail So every one of his victims families and friends Can make Forty-one ass-whipping calls (Baraka, Giuliani 20) During a poetry workshop at the Betty Shabazz Wholistic Retreat Center in the summer of 2000, Amiri Baraka debuted a new satiric poem that he had been working on for a political anthology entitled Keeping Track: 41 Voices, 41 Visions for Amadou Diallo. longstanding tension between New York City Mayor Rudolph and his constituents (some members of the lower class and minorities, especially African Americans) came to a head when the unarmed African emigrant was gunned down by four undercover New York City Police Officers in the vestibule of his Bronx apartment building in February 1999. case of mistaken identity, the special Street Crime Unit shot at the defenseless twenty-two-year-old forty-one times, striking him nineteen. Long before the shooting, however, Mayor had been harshly criticized for fostering an atmosphere in which citizens have a right to fear the police, and since, for impatiently mishandling the investigation into the special crime unit whose motto is ironically taken from a Baraka poem, Own the Night. In the poem A Proposal for Giuliani's Disposal in Forty-one Verses Which Are Also Curses, Baraka viciously lampoons Mayor for what many activists and citizens believe to be Giuliani's complicity in the murder of the innocent young man, and the city's strong-armed attack upon the people of New York. Before he read, Baraka joked that soon after he had written the poem cursing Giuliani, the inhumane mayor was diagnosed with prostate cancer. The audience laughed, Baraka chuckled, but given his illustrated knowledge of Yoruba conjure, his belief in the West African concept of Nommo, the power of the word, and his almost four decades of radical activism, Amiri Baraka could have been deadly serious. Baraka's Modest Proposal, unlike eighteenth-century satirist Jonathan Swift's satiric prose piece of the same title, relies heavily upon Juvenalian satire, which the Encyclopedia Britannica defines as any bitter and ironic criticism of contemporary persons and institutions that is filled with personal invective, angry moral indignation, and pessimism. Here's an example: Dog Dick Pus, Ugly wound ... The Bad Breath of Ibis, The Devil's Gas, Criminal G, Successor, R Like the Child Killer, White Death, Black Death, Murder Man, Death Jam, Mayor NAZI Chiller, Insane Killer, Rudy Maniac, Murder Beast, Rudy the Vile, 666, City Hall Hitler, The Ice Man, Killer Rudy, Rudy Death, Rudy The Ripper, Crazy Rudy, Doo Doo De Sade, Grand Dragon of The Apple, Mayor Murderer, Alcalde Diablo ... Serial Assassin. Though quite funny, the poem never allows the reader to forget the tragedy that inspired it. The phrase 41, the number of bullets the police shot at the unarmed African, which recurs in all forty-one verses, stands as a testament to the excessive force that Mayor allowed to be visited upon the people. The reader may laugh, but will forever link Mayor to the murder of innocence. Baraka's contemporary satiric poem, though less sophisticated than his satiric drama of the '60s and '70s, has evolved just as the word warrior himself has evolved, as well as the world and the people for whom he writes. We are no longer embroiled in open racial warfare, as when Dutchman, the first play by Amiri Baraka, then LeRoi Jones, was produced in 1964. Therefore, his contemporary satire has to meet the people where they are (often times in their comfort zone), without being preachy or overtly didactic. Baraka calls Dahmer's Successor ... Death Jam, Mayor NAZI, Chiller, Insane Killer ... Rudy The Ripper ... Doo Doo Brain, and his message is immediately received. Readers might be inspired to action--maybe to attend a rally, withdraw all support from Giuliani's administration; maybe to write letters to their congressman and hold all such politicians accountable for their deeds for and against the people. …

Contemporary satire of corporate managers: Time to cut the boss some slack?

Contemporary satire of corporate managers: Time to cut the boss some slack?

Themes and Threnodies in Contemporary Satire

The Political QuarterlyVolume 69, Issue B p. 28-29 Themes and Threnodies in Contemporary Satire Martin Rowson, Martin RowsonSearch for more papers by this author Martin Rowson, Martin RowsonSearch for more papers by this author First published: 17 December 2002 https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-923X.00189AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume69, IssueB1998Pages 28-29 RelatedInformation

Fables of Subversion: Satire and the American Novel, 1930- 1980 (review)

Reviewed by: Fables of Subversion: Satire and the American Novel, 1930–1980 David W. Madden Steven Weisenburger. Fables of Subversion: Satire and the American Novel, 1930–1980. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1995. 320 pp. In Fables of Subversion Steven Weisenburger challenges a host of traditional notions about satire and postmodern American fiction. In spite of its seemingly limited scope—American novels between 1930 and 1980—Weisenburger offers a serious and probing refutation of New Critical assumptions that have dominated scholarly and popular discourse on the subject. [End Page 848] The study’s introduction carefully lays the conceptual and theoretical foundation for the five remaining chapters. Weisenburger draws a crucial distinction between generative and “degenerative” satirical writing, with the generative mode representing traditional satires. The degenerative mode he describes as “delegitimizing . . . function[ing] to subvert hierarchies of value and to reflect suspiciously on all ways of making meaning, including its own. Still more, it suspects that any symbolic practice may entail incursions of power whose logic tends toward either total domination or the final chaos of reciprocal violence.” This degenerative mode is largely a postmodern phenomenon. Drawing primarily on Jean-François Lyotard, Weisenburger emphasizes the postmodern doubt about the modernists’ attempts to use literature as a way of establishing a canon of high art and enlightenment. Instead, postmodern art emphasizes contingency and pluralist approaches, which, “[d]espite all their apparent negativity and nihilism, . . . the subversive carnivals of postmodernism bear witness to the opening of a ‘pagan’ discourse that was always at the heart of modern darkness.” Postmodern satirists “suspect all structures, including structures of perceiving, representing, and transforming,” and their works interrogate the violence and terror inherent in established cultural forms of discourse. Consistent features of the contemporary satire are its deformations of plot, grotesque violence, transtextuality, and excessive attention to details. Weisenburger clearly demonstrates the ways in which Formalist criticism has dominated the scholarship on satire, defining conventions which simply have nothing to do with degenerative, postmodern fictions. Weisenburger refutes the validity of four crucial assumptions underlying traditional criticism—satire is a rhetorical formulation offering a rational argument and appealing to the common opinions of a majority of readers; it requires an extramural object of attack rather than the act of fiction-making itself; satire is a moral or ethical corrective; and it is normative. In each case he demonstrates that the methods and purposes of degenerative satire have nothing in common with conventions drawn from far more conventional satiric models. Finally, the introduction considers research on the grotesque and carnivalesque to clarify the sensibility of degenerative satire. “Carnival definitively illustrates the semiotic processes of dismantling and exposure of [End Page 849] which satire is a part. Amid its disorder, one discovers points of view, specific orderings that are suppressed by or in sharp opposition to authorized representations.” The lineage of writers considered begins with Nathanael West whose works tend increasingly toward the fully accomplished degenerative mode defined in the first chapter. The Day of the Locust is the apogee of West’s satiric practices and a work that “can be read as a narrative about the troubled emergence of a radical, degenerative mode of satire.” Analyses of Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood and John Hawkes’s The Cannibal emphasize the contemporary development of this sensibility. A chapter devoted to Black Humor presents the most careful and well-argued reevaluation of that literary phenomenon to date. While regarding Black Humor as “the early, literary expression of an emerging postmodernism,” Weisenburger cuts through the hyperbole of many longstanding assumptions to demonstrate that the impulse to joke dominates the fictions of Kurt Vonnegut, J. P. Donleavy, and Terry Southern. James Purdy’s Cabot Wright Begins, a book for some time overlooked by critics and scholars, is seen as an inspired failure, while Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, Donald Barthelme’s Snow White, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, and Hawkes’s Travesty are submitted as the most daring and fully realized examples of Black Humor satire. A fourth chapter addresses examples of social and political satire in the 1960s, wherein Weisenburger argues that postmodern American satires have less to do with corrective solutions than the exposition of dissent...

The Friar Portrait in Bodleian Library MS. Douce 104: Contemporary Satire?

The Friar Portrait in Bodleian Library MS. Douce 104: Contemporary Satire?

Contemporary Political Satire: Narrative Strategies in the Post-Modern Context , and: Ellipse of Uncertainty: An Introduction to Postmodern Fantasy , and: Postmodernist Fiction (review)

Reviewed by: Contemporary Political Satire: Narrative Strategies in the Post-Modern Context, and: Ellipse of Uncertainty: An Introduction to Postmodern Fantasy, and: Postmodernist Fiction E. Ann Kaplan M. D. Fletcher . Contemporary Political Satire: Narrative Strategies in the Post-Modern Context. New York: Lanham, 1987. 185pp. $25.00 cloth; pb. $12.50. Lance Olsen . Ellipse of Uncertainty: An Introduction to Postmodern Fantasy. Westport: Greenwood, 1987. 134pp. $27.95. Brian McHale . Postmodernist Fiction. New York: Methuen, 1987. 300pp. $39.95 cloth; pb. $13.95. The three books under review (all published in 1987) confirm that postmodernism is still a term in search of a definition; each area of study (English Literature, American Literature, Film Studies, Art History, and Criticism) uses "postmodernism" in different ways that have to do with theoretical models current in that field. None of the books here, for instance, makes much use of the work of either Jean Baudrillard or Fredric Jameson (to name two central postmodern theorists often discussed in media and art criticism) or of the debates that have taken place in feminist and Marxist circles. In fact, I suspect diat some of the writers here felt constrained to position their work within the now fashionable concept of postmodernism, or they succumbed to pressure from publishers always concerned about "marketability." The strain is perhaps felt most keenly in Fletcher's book about satire and apologues. Fletcher's aims are laudable: taking a traditional literary genre and basic method, he traces changes in the specifically political satire or apologue from the 1950s to the present. The strain appears in his insistence on making a case for the postmodernsatire—that is, in including recent works as examples of political satire. What he actuallyshows is that satire in its original senses and as a specific literary genre is impossible in the postmodern era. This is something that Fletcher himself at times admits: for instance, in the Introduction, Fletcher notes that the prerequisites for satire "appear to conflict with the contemporary assumptions about reality, human knowledge and values that inform 'post-modern' literature—metafiction, surfiction, the nonfiction novel, etc." Nevertheless, Fletcher prefers to see a novel like Vidal's Duluthas a "Post-Modern Political Satire" rather than simply as a postmodern text. It might have been better to argue that once postmodernism emerges as a new kind of consciousness in the wake of the 1960s, something so drastic happens to the political satire that the term no longer applies. Fletcher could either have invented a new term for a novel like Duluthor have explored the pertinence of Fredric Jameson's concept of pastiche (a mode set off against parodythat belongs in the satiric genre) that Jameson sees as specifically postmodern. Either strategy might have worked better than straining to fit Duluthinto the same tradition as the other novels considered. In many instances, it is clear that Fletcher needed to address the modernist/postmodernist debate; for often when he uses or refers to the term "postmodern," I thought that "modernist" was what he really was after. For example, he talks about the idea that reality is fragmented as a postmodern concept, when that seems to me rather a modernistnotion. I don't believe that Fletcher ever uses the term "modernist," which would support my hunch that he is collapsing two terms that require clear differentiation. Since postmodernism precisely [End Page 733]announces the demise of satire, Fletcher's thesis would only have been strengthened by his making that idea central: as it is, he confuses matters by alternately insisting on textual properties traditionally labeled "satire" and arguing that, after all, contemporary satire can, as it were, add on what Fletcher calls "the intellectual assumptions of post-modern literature," as if such assumptions were a kind of decoration rather than a way of being. Many of these problems are taken care of in Lance Olsen's Ellipse of Uncertainty: An Introduction to Postmodern Fantasy, which, interestingly enough, takes on a project analogous to Fletcher's and is similarly organized. Where Fletcher took the traditional literary genre of satire and attempted to position it within the contemporary context, Olsen takes a traditional genre—this...

Contemporary Satire against Ruiz de Alarcon as Lover

Contemporary Satire against Ruiz de Alarcon as Lover

The Braggart in Italian Renaissance Comedy

The chief purpose of this paper is to describe one phase of the domestication of Latin drama on the Renaissance stage, specifically to show how a conventional type made famous by the Roman comedians, the miles gloriosus, was fashioned by the academic playwrights of sixteenth-century Italy into an instrument of contemporary satire. A secondary aim is to provide a fuller literary background for the study of the braggart in Elizabethan drama. Such analysis requires a summary of themes, situations, and attitudes that have enriched the comic tradition of Europe, and demands also a definition of the comic spirit that exposes and derides the vainglorious folly of the alazon or boaster who struts and brags of his merits in utter disregard of truth. Menander and his disciples in Latin comedy developed a satiric method which the Italians borrowed for the ridicule of modern representatives of the alazon. Any consideration of the commedia erudita must also be prefaced by a review of the political conditions in Italy that brought to prominence such hated types as the Spaniard and other mercenary soldiers. This paper describes the rôle of the Spaniard and traces the evolution of the braggart from the imitations of Plautus and Terence, through the modifications of conventional themes, and finally to the new elements inspired by the changed domestic conditions of the peninsula.

Contemporary Satire in Otway's Venice Preserved

From the accession of Charles II, English drama manifested a continuous strain of political satire, most of it in favor of the Court party. The Roundheads, the citizens, the Presbyterians, the opposers of the Crown, above all the foremost Liberal of the day, Anthony Ashley Cooper, later the Earl of Shaftesbury, were fair game to be attacked in a prologue, an epilogue, and even at times in a full-length character portrayal or an entire play.