Satire Research Articles

Age of Genius or Century of Revolution? Russian Culture and Power Across the High-Low Divide, 1850–1950

Abstract This article discusses Jeffrey Brooks’ metaphor of an integrated ecosystem to describe Russian cultural history in the late imperial and early Soviet periods. Brooks’s Firebird and the Fox describes an interlocking cultural system marked by high-low interactions, as a rich Russian folkloric tradition based on fable and popular tales was reworked with remarkable creativity in what he calls an “age of genius.” In response, this article argues that this period of Russian cultural creativity can be seen as coinciding with the extended life-cycle of the Russian Revolution. The subversive, satirical humor and irony running through Brooks’s cultural “play-sphere” was complemented by another tradition: a didactic, instructional, enlightening “teach-sphere” that animated a wide range of intelligentsia and cultural forces shaping cultural evolution and cultural revolution. If the play-sphere highlights the rebellious distance between culture and power, the teach-sphere’s project of transforming the masses reveals their many commonalities. The essay reflects on how the intersections of culture and power shaped early Soviet culture, the avant-garde, and successive phases of Stalinist culture. While Socialist Realism promoted the theoretical declaration of a unified socialist culture, the persistence of differing elements of the cultural system raises the question of Soviet cultural syncretism.

Framing the (in)sensible in Egypt’s post-2011 satirical novels in The Queue and Cats of the Eluded Year

After Egypt’s 2011 Revolution and the trials and tribulations that led to the re-ascendancy of the old regime to state control, policies of repression intensified to silence dissidents and limit the freedom of cultural expression. The inventiveness of Egyptian novels, however, has not only withstood that authoritarian political temperament, but also managed to perforate its enforced wall of silence, carrying on protest in the cacophonous outcries for change in their artistic expression. This article reads two satirical novels produced in the post-2011 Egyptian context, Basma Abdel Aziz’s al-Tabur, 2013 (The Queue, 2016) and Ibrahim Abdel Meguid’s Qitat al-ᶜam al-faᵓit, 2017 (Cats of the Eluded Year), as examples of the current novelistic undertakings aiming to polemically subvert and destabilize the status quo. Drawing on Mikahil Bakhtin’s conceptions of satire, heteroglossia, and the carnivalesque, the article explores their inventive aesthetics and peculiar combination of seemingly paradoxical literary attitudes, such as realism and fantasy, tragedy and comedy, bluntness and cynicism, as well as the fusion of human heroism and indignation. Providing a survey of Egyptian satire and its correlation with inverting systems of dominance, the article examines these satirical novels as historical forms that respond to pervasive power asymmetries in their postcolonial context.

Bad parrhesia: the limits of cynicism in the public sphere

Bad parrhesia: the limits of cynicism in the public sphere

HATE SPEECH ON JOKO WIDODO’S OFFICAL FACEBOOK: AN ANALYSIS OF IMPOLITENESS STRATEGIES USED BY DIFFERENT GENDER

This study aims to reveal how hate speech was realized by netizens of different gender commenting on the Covid-19 pandemic issue posted on the official Facebook fan page of President Joko Widodo. This research was a qualitative descriptive. The research data consisted of 100 netizens’ comments selected from Joko Widodo's Facebook fan page. The data were divided into two categories: 50 comments made by male netizens and 50 comments by female netizens. Data were analyzed based on impoliteness strategies developed by Culpeper. The findings show that male netizens tend to use bold on record impoliteness strategies to express their hatred towards Joko Widodo, followed by positive, negative, and sarcasm impoliteness, respectively. On the other hand, female netizens preferred to use positive impoliteness, negative, sarcasm, and bald on record impoliteness strategies. These findings indicate that male and female netizens differ in expressing their hate speech towards Joko Widodo. Male netizens tend to be clearer, more harsh and straightforward than female ones in expressing their hatred. Keywords : impoliteness, hate speech, speech act, gender, facebook

Humour and satire in everyday life in 1920s Soviet society

In the Soviet society of the 1920s, humour and satire existed on two levels: official and unofficial. They have rather diverse forms. At the official level, there were, first of all, satirical articles, humoresques, and cartoons in the newspapers. Newspapers were an integral part of Soviet everyday life. Secondly, there were the performances of propaganda teams (the «Blue Blouse» in particular). These performances took place at any venues: in working clubs and village halls, on the factory floors, in different offices. The repertoire of propaganda teams always included satirical couplets directed against «internal and external enemies». At the unofficial level, there were witty-ditties, funny couplets, and anecdotes. They have various contents: from everyday and romantic issues to political problems. Therefore, at this level humour and satire expressed a critical attitude to the government and popular protest. At each level, humour and satire had their own goals and fulfilled various functions: from ideological to relaxational.

Zeugma in A. Cantemir’s Satires

Zeugma in A. Cantemir’s Satires

『開闢』의 [銀파리]에 나타난 풍자의 양상

『開闢』의 [銀파리]에 나타난 풍자의 양상

The Rubberbandits’ Guide to Satire: Absurdism and Social Commentary in a Cross-Media Environment

This paper argues that through an engagement with cross-media hybridity, Irish comedy duo The Rubberbandits have established a dynamic cross-media forum that aims to restore the Irish public’s capacity for critical social and political engagement. Central to this process is The Rubberbandits’ ability to use their absurdist satire as a foundational tool that can serve as the basis of this cultural forum, while also facilitating the negotiation of social and political issues across a variety of media. Given that this cultural forum exists across different media, platforms, and formats, this paper sets out to analyse the various ways in which the duo have adapted their satirical style to suit the demands of these different media forms, and what implications this process of adaption has had on their work. Beginning with an analysis of the social and critical functions of satirical comedy more broadly, this paper will then focus on the specific brand of satirical social commentary employed by The Rubberbandits, paying particular attention to the role of absurdity in their critical engagement with prominent issues facing Irish society. As this paper will demonstrate, by embracing the hybridity of the cross-media environment, all the while maintaining their absurdist satirical style, The Rubberbandits have established a dynamic and carnivalesque cross-media forum that aims to restore the Irish public’s capacity for critical social and political engagement.

Hostile Humor in Renaissance France. By Bruce Hayes

Bruce Hayes’s book on the use of humour in French-language religious polemics of the sixteenth century grapples thoughtfully with a topic of enduring concern, and one that seems particularly pertinent in the current moment. The volume focuses on the decades leading up to the explosion of armed conflict in the 1560s and culminates in a refreshing and recontextualized presentation of Pierre de Ronsard’s contribution, on the Catholic side, to the war of words with Calvinist Geneva. That so much of the humour employed by religious polemicists on both sides of the confessional divide relied on — and further developed — misogynistic, xenophobic, homophobic, and transphobic tropes that, while offensive to a modern sensibility, are sadly still found in ostensibly comedic contexts, serves to emphasize both the alterity and the depressing familiarity of this aspect of early modern culture. Hayes deals with this problem carefully and tactfully, acknowledging that the jokes he analyses are, to an overwhelming degree, no longer funny to the modern reader. He nevertheless engages respectfully with the sense of humour that generated and originally consumed these jokes while preserving a protective critical distance for himself and his own readers. In so doing, he maintains a dual focus on the kind of aggressive satirical humour referred to in the period as ‘sardonic’ and on the growing criticism of it by contemporaries as irreligious or even blasphemous. Sixteenth-century readers, especially those on the receiving end of ‘jokes’ that, for instance, called for Huguenots to be burned at the stake en masse, were well aware of the potential of humour to act as a justification or a trigger for violence; Hayes draws out this dimension effectively and accounts persuasively for the disrepute into which the risus sardonicus fell even as religious conflict intensified in France. A further valuable aspect of Hayes’s book is its refreshingly varied and catholic corpus, which includes — and has the merit of taking seriously — both lesser-studied works of major writers (such as the plays of Marguerite de Navarre) and texts that enjoyed a wide diffusion in the sixteenth century but are virtually unknown today (such as the works of the bloodthirsty Artus Désiré, whom Hayes dubs ‘Renaissance France’s most successful, forgotten Catholic polemicist’, p. 55). Chapters on the Affaire des placards, evangelical and reformist comic theatre, Désiré, Calvinist propaganda and the theatrical works of the sociétés joyeuses of Paris and Rouen provide a rich diachronic context for Hayes’s concluding analysis of Ronsard’s Discours des miseres de ce temps, whose own humour — itself by turns playful and aggressive — emerges more clearly against the backdrop of the bloodcurdling satirical barbs that preceded it and that it itself elicited from Ronsard’s Calvinist adversaries. Whilst this book is unlikely to change our understanding of the way that humour functioned in the sixteenth century — its theoretical underpinnings are rather too briefly sketched to allow this — it does enable the modern reader, under the tutelage of a prudent guide, better to appreciate what was at stake in both the political and the poetic conflict.

“Nachalstvo”, “Blat” e “Blarney” Paul Durcan entre a Irlanda e a Russia

In Durcan’s poetic work, a strong interest in Russian history and culture can be observed. The poet’s fascination with Russia manifests itself predominantly in his poetry collection Going Home to Russia published in 1987. The poems featuring in the book geographically cover the entire Soviet Union, reaching from the Baltic to the Pacific and from the White to the Black Sea, while at the same time moving back and forwards between Ireland and Russia. One of the most striking features of Durcan’s volume is his outspokenness, “a slap in the face of public taste”, using the title the Russian cubofuturists’ manifesto published at the beginning of the twentieth century. Durcan’s satirical approach to contemporary Irish society could be seen as of post-modern nature as established societal values become undermined through mockery and sarcasm.

Creating Juvenalian Mirrors in Reading Isidore Okpewho’s The Last Duty

Abstract A great deal of African literature attempts to create Juvenal mirrors in addressing topical issues that confront aspects of society itself. This essay argues that Okpewho’s The Last Duty employs Juvenal satires in exposing the follies and foibles of the society. Okpewho presents detailed description of the inhuman and devastating issues, including corruption, wickedness, dishonesty and injustices that bedevil the society. Okpewho employs the candour and perceptiveness of narrators and characters to depict the suffering and violence in African society. The study examines selected Juvenal themes such as Corruption, People without Compassion are Worse than Animals, Soldiers are above the Law, The Decay of Feminine Virtue and The Vanity of Human Wishes.

La Interpretatio deNebrija aPersio en laDeclaraciónMagistraldeDiegoLópez

How Diego López uses the comment that Nebrija had made on the Persius’ Satires is analyzed in this work. The places where he quotes Nebrija and many explanations of the Declaración show that López owes a lot to the Interpretatio of the master Antonio.

What Satire Can Do for Us

What Satire Can Do for Us

О СУДЕ ЗЕМНОМ И СУДЕ НЕБЕСНОМ В ОТЕЧЕСТВЕННОЙ КОМЕДИИ XVIII ВЕКА

This article studies the semantics and poetics of appeal to God’s Court which creates certain contextual meaning in satirical comedies devoted to revealing the truth about court injustice and heartless court officials. The analysis is based on the plays by D.I. Fonvizin, N.R. Sudovshchikov, and V.V. Kapnist. Research methods: holistic philological analysis of a literary text.

Codes of Intimacy: Love, Chance, and Masculinity in Henry James's Confidence

Codes of IntimacyLove, Chance, and Masculinity in Henry James's Confidence Karin Hoepker (bio) Setting aside older quarrels over the boundaries of a naturalist canon, this essay argues for a more comprehensive understanding of post-Civil War literary production which traces lines of connection between realism, naturalism, and sentimental fiction. I read Henry James's Confidence (1879), a novel disregarded by critics for more than a century, as a complex text that programmatically investigates codes of intimacy and familiarity against the background of a transatlantic economy of risk, globalization, and uncertainty. As a story of male friendship and romance, jealousy, miscommunication, and a social experiment gone wrong, Confidence explores the late nineteenth-century semantics of love that paradoxically demands both serendipity and inevitable necessity. The novel's often overlooked sharp satirical humor dissects a psychosocial construct of masculine individualism which struggles to maintain a sense of agency within an emerging "age of capital" (Levy 189). Nancy Walker and Donna Campbell have long made convincing arguments for a reevaluation of literary production in the late nineteenth century that revises the lines of distinction drawn between realism, naturalism, and sentimental writing as both heavily gendered and sustaining a prejudice against literature as a marketable commodity. Along similar lines of traditional canonization and bias against the popular and sentimental, Henry James's critics have ignored Confidence as one of his lesser works. Written for profit, tailored to please the tastes of a broader readership, it has, almost by default, been deemed devoid of artistic value. I propose to suspend such categorization and focus on the cultural work of the novel instead. I am interested in what Confidence might tell us about the function of fiction in a late nineteenth-century socioeconomic paradigm of increased social complexity, functional differentiation, and [End Page 1] what kind of impact a pervading logic of market speculation has on contemporaneous codes of familiarity and intimacy. The social system of a capitalist market casts subject relationships in a new light; mutual assessments of value dominate and threaten to overwrite previous narratives of intimacy, familiarity, and ideational values of friendship with a transactional agenda. Speculative capitalism becomes part of the field of invisible forces to which the human subject is exposed and thus also forms one of the "insults" (as Freud had famously called them) to human self-perception and individualist fantasies of control, which naturalism eventually comes to highlight.1 Nineteenth-century literary production centrally engages in an exploration of coping mechanisms, in strategies of complexity reduction, and in efforts of managing the emerging threats of uncertainty and social change. Literary texts address the increasing sense of fragmentation of reality as it is individually and collectively experienced and, more specifically, respond to a crisis of knowledge production and masculinity.2 In this context, Henry James's Confidence engages with issues of masculinity within a broader field of complexity and uncertainty. The novel employs a seemingly conventional sentimental plotline of love and romance to reframe problems of subjectivity, intimacy, and knowledge production. To that end, Niklas Luhmann's discussion of love and trust in modern societies as increasingly differentiating socioeconomic systems provides a conceptual frame for a new reading of Confidence. Luhmann's reflections on the semantics of love help foreground the cultural work of James's text as a forerunner of "naturalist sentimentalism" (Sawaya 56); they highlight how Confidence uses an aesthetics of the sentimental to dismount narratives of individualism and autonomous agency and rejects simplistic ideas of causality and determination. Tapping into the rich resources of sentimental aesthetics and the novel of manners, James employs codes of intimacy at the core of romantic love to question predominant discourses of individualism that are an intricate part of novelistic writing of his time. Confidence targets capitalist fantasies of entrepreneurial individuals as well as realist narratives of individual agency and experience. It humorously exposes the latent sentimental economies of such narratives and the gendered and classist rhetoric that primarily serves the economically privileged figure of the male dilettante. As Confidence pairs romantic narrative and marriage plots with the specters of lost friendship and divorce, it highlights themes of speculation, uncertainty, and confidence as part of a broader engagement with systemic...

Centering Peripheries: The Return of Regionalism in Indonesian Independent Cinema

Centering Peripheries: The Return of Regionalism in Indonesian Independent Cinema Dag Yngvesson (bio) If the idea of the nation as a “dispersed, archipelagic” assembly rather than a clearly defined, homogenous image is taken as an enduring historical fact in Southeast Asia, what are the consequences for the region’s cinemas?1 Engaging an oceanic history, this essay proposes that in Southeast Asia, filmmakers have always been at work taking apart, recentering, and constructing formative regions within and around the national. Their visions frequently position sub-and supranational areas as constitutive of the national cinematic imaginary. If “national” films are constantly shuttling between regions as both centers and formative peripheries, can the nation be made visible, and to whom does it most matter? To address these questions, I will contextualize the recent work of independent filmmakers from Yogyakarta, a small yet artistically active city and region in Java, within national and regional cinematic histories. Their efforts to negotiate a position simultaneously central and peripheral to the nation will be compared with the regional-archipelagic focus of Indonesian film-makers under President Soekarno (1949– 1966). Through conversations with Yogyakarta-based filmmakers and close readings of writer-director Yosep Anggi Noen’s Vakansi yang Janggal dan Penyakit Lainnya (Peculiar Vacation and [End Page 169] Other Illnesses, 2012) and Hiruk-PikukSiAl-Kisah (The Science of Fictions, 2019), I reveal the ways in which contemporary Indonesian cinema draws on regional and subnational perspectives, positioning these regional “peripheries” as key processors of globalized histories and aesthetic forms. From its origins in the early 1950s, Indonesian cinema has functioned as a self-conscious paradox. During the Soekarno era (1945– 1967), film-makers like Usmar Ismail, Asrul Sani, and Nya Abbas Akup worked to build critical national consciousness by deconstructing the sanctity of both the nation and the darker aspects of its anti-colonial struggle of becoming. A large percentage of Indonesia’s early cineastes, artists, and intellectuals (including Ismail and Sani) came from West Sumatra. Although a relatively small region, it has had an outsized historical influence as a cosmopolitan center for the exchange of ideas and political paradigms with Egypt and other areas throughout the modern Islamic world. (It was also the center of PRRI, Pemerintah Revolusioner Republik Indonesia, or the Revolutionary Government of the Republic of Indonesia, a well-armed separatist movement that was finally put down by a massive strike from the national army in 1961.) Many West Sumatran filmmakers and artists became “national” figures after migrating to another influential hub, Jakarta, the nation’s capital but also officially a “special region” with a unique system of administration and its own funding for the arts. Cineastes from West Sumatra and elsewhere who lived and worked in Jakarta resisted the imposition of a homogenizing view that positioned the capital as the nation’s true locus. The fragmented and often decentered views of the nation they put on its screens frequently highlight the perspectives of subnational regions like Bandung, rural East Java, or North and West Sumatra. The critical consciousness of the nation these filmmakers sought to build can thus be seen in light of their experience of the geographically and epistemically fragmented, archipelagic nature of Indonesia, of having lived, learned, and thought in and from a number of different regional and island centers. In films such as Ismail’s Tamu Agung (Exalted Guest, 1955) or Djadoeg Djajakusuma’s Harimau Tjampa (The Tiger from Tjampa, 1953), the subnational regions that serve as settings are positioned as if at the center of a series of surrounding “peripheries,” formative loops that encompass the national, supranational, regional, and transnational.2 Influences from these “foreign” areas, while inevitable, are rearranged and translated by filmmakers into a particular pattern largely determined by the subnational locality that is positioned as the locus of both screen and diegesis. The idea that many of the trans/national elements made peripheral in these films are actually “supposed” to be more central was often exploited for satirical humor. Take, for example, Nya Abbas Akup’s Tiga Buronan (Three Fugitives, 1957), which is set in rural West Java. Toward the film’s beginning, [End Page 170] it features an absurdly happy musical scene with prancing, singing rice...

Images and Representations of the Rudnytskyi Family: The Case of Ukrainians in Galicia Between the Wars

Caricature journals in the interwar period had a special genre niche, giving the masses, through funny cartoons, a simplified understanding of internal and external political processes. Zyz and Komar were the largest Ukrainian satirical humor journals in interwar Galicia. They mainly covered the internal political life in the Second Polish Republic and international relationships. These journals are primarily intended for people from the countryside, and the editors and owners of these journals used anti-Semitism for the political mobilization of the rural population. I use elements of Serge Moscovici’s theory of social representations to track these processes. A key aspect here is how the image of the Rudnytskyi family was shaped on the pages of these journals. The family was of mixed Ukrainian-Jewish origins, and its members became prominent figures in various spheres of Ukrainian social and political life in interwar Galician Ukrainian socjety (in politics, literature, music, and the women’s movement). The behavior of the Rudnytskyi family was explained to the readers through their Jewish origins. Zyz and Komar both created an image of the Rudnytskyis as an integral Jewish group occupying different spheres of Ukrainian life. The study of visual caricature images thus enables us to explore the channels of the formation and spread of anti-Semitic images of Jews and the use of the image of “the Jew” in the Galician Ukrainian society in interwar Poland.

Jane Austen’s Emma, Adam Smith’s ‘impartial spectator’, market capitalism and free-indirect discourse.

Jane Austen’s Emma is famous for being among the earliest and most sophisticated expositions of free-indirect discourse which is used to represent ironically a match-making heroine of 21 years whose judgements are usually faulty. It is also famous as a brilliant courtship romance or love story, much imitated in recent years. Less often noticed is that it is a fiercely satiric comedy about the rise of the middle class and the penetration of genteel English society with the language and values of market capitalism. Drawing inspiration from John Bender’s Imagining the Penitentiary and Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation this essay proposes that the author’s use of free-indirect discourse constructs Emma as a subject who does not comprehend her own subjectivity, and whose need to be taught to see herself objectively, thanks to the tutelage of Mr. Knightley, opens a paradox in which the subject and its subjectivity need to comprehend themselves objectively as exchangeable objects within a capitalist market society. This paradox is identified as coming to prominence in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, and, for those who refuse to learn regulation, in the Panopticon penitentiary advocated by Jeremy Bentham.

Humour, neutrality, and preparedness: American satirical magazines and the First World War, 1914–1917

This article discusses how American satirical magazines responded to the First World War while the United States remained a neutral power. By focusing on these previously overlooked sources, it demonstrates that satirical humour performed two significant functions. First, it acted as a tool of persuasion through which magazines agitated for or against American intervention in the conflict. Second, it became a major means with which periodicals sought to ostracize German-Americans, fuelling nativist sentiment. Ultimately, satirical magazines suggest that while responses to the war were initially diverse, most Americans had come to support military intervention by April 1917.

Синтаксические эмфатические конструкции в преподавании иностранных языков

The article considers the use of syntactic emphatic constructions that become a matter of rising interest not only for the science fiction translators, but also for the teachers of foreign languages and the methodologists. Special attention is paid to the communicative method of teaching, since this method has accumulated the greatest experience in introducing fiction into the field of teaching foreign languages. There has been analyzed the descriptive-analytical method which makes it possible to process the selected lexical material, and the classification method which allows determining the specifics of phenomena and their properties. The material for the study was a series of satirical novels by P. G. Wodehouse, whose characters are a British aristocrat Worcester and his servant Jeeves. In addition to the wide range of stylistic tools used in the novels the author described many realities of early twentieth-century Britain that can be used as a basis for linguoculturological study. There have been analyzed the syntactic emphatic constructions and their main models based on the classification of L. A. Sokolova, E. P. Trofimova and N. A. Kalevich and the examples from the novel. It has been inferred that using fiction literature at the lessons of foreign languages is promising and recommended for further study by specialists in the field of teaching foreign languages. The results of the study can be used in the students’ research works when writing essays, final qualifying papers, preparing creative projects in linguistics and stylistics of English language, the theory and practice of translation