Tradition Of Satire Research Articles

Aliens and Alienation in Pierre Boulle’s La Planète des Singes

ABSTRACT This article offers a radical re-reading of Pierre Boulle’s Planète des singes (1963), a novel dealing with interplanetary exploration in 2500 and the discovery of a world in the Betelgeuse system with three orders of rational simian species and a subjugated humanoid race void of rationality and abused by the primates on the planet. This close of the novel focuses on the narrator’s love affairs with two extraterrestrial females (one a low-intelligence humanoid, the other a rational chimpanzee-like creature). In this framed science-fiction novel, Boulle creates a first-person narrative with a dislikeable central character, Ulysse, who unwittingly engineers the downfall and extinction of humankind. I propose that the work should be interpreted less in the satiric tradition, with which it undoubtedly possesses affinities, and more as a veiled and sustained critique of Western capitalism and the consumerist society of the reader. Boulle subtly uses the taboo relationships of Ulysse with two aliens as a reflection on social codes and agencies of control.

Editor’s Introduction

The articles in this issue of Soundings explore concepts with some familiar elements to deepen our sense of the ambiguity and complexity located around the nodes of race and metaphysics in the late eighteenth century and around the concept of metropolitanism as it has developed across centuries. These pieces use close contextualized readings of significant works and words to offer a richly layered understanding, often leading to more questions instead of straightforward answers.Steffen Ralf Lösel’s “Monostatos: Racism in Die Zauberflöte” reads the opera’s depiction of its moor character in the context of depictions of Africans in Enlightenment Europe and the historical traces of Angelo Soliman, an African living in Vienna and known by Mozart. Lösel’s careful reading of the libretto alongside theatrical, anthropological, and historical writings of the time situates the portrayal in a richly detailed context. His interpretation avoids definitive answers about artistic intention (since these answers do not survive in the textual documentation) while clearly recognizing the racial stereotypes perpetuated in the creative product.A similar attention to eighteenth-century historical context and textual complexity marks Allen Dunn’s “Spirits of Satire.” This piece mines the ambiguities in satires written by Immanuel Kant and William Blake about Emanuel Swedenborg’s mystical writings to explore the ongoing philosophical question of how we can claim metaphysical truth. Complications abound in Swedenborg’s scientific and religious writings and in Kant’s and Blake’s satirical reactions to them. Dunn notes how Kant and Blake both draw on and deviate from the satirical tradition to build their conflicted responses to Swedenborg and to cast the artistic and poetic imaginations as truer paths to reveal some experiences than the discourse of scientific certainty.Sophia Basaldua focuses her attention on a particular word, “metropolis,” to trace its conceptual significance over the centuries and through recent articulations across several academic discourses. She brings etymological and historical lenses to bear on the task as well as the specific disciplinary conceptualizations from postcolonial studies, literary studies, and urban studies to stress the shifting emphases on centrality, governing control, urbanity, and culture. Instead of identifying a uniform or correct interpretation of the term across these uses, she hopes to encourage more scholarship that recognizes and builds upon its alternative and conflicted histories.Our review section features books that similarly seek complex and multi-faceted re-assessments of familiar concepts or figures. Carter Neal discusses Caroline Winterer’s project in American Enlightenments of arguing against the “bicentennial consensus” of the American Enlightenment depicted in three significant histories published around 1976. In addition to tracing the complexities of Winterer’s argument, Neal also contextualizes it through a miniature review essay in footnotes, within the ongoing historiographical reassessment of American slavery. Linda Simon traces a similar search for complex re-readings in Paul Croce’s Young William James Thinking; Croce draws connections between the thinking of the older and younger James that are generally overlooked in treatments of his life. Finally, Piotr Gwiazda provides an engaging overview of Amanda Golden’s edited collection of essays: This Business of Words: Reassessing Anne Sexton. From the diverse essays, written by literary scholars and creative writers, Gwiazda highlights the ambiguities and contradictions that characterized Sexton.While varied in subject, these pieces demonstrate the careful, layered analysis through and of contexts that bring these conceptual lenses into focus rather than taking them for granted.

Playing fairly: the satiric tradition in football fiction from Latin America

ABSTRACTWorks by eminent authors Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares and Mario Benedetti are early precursors to a tradition of satirizing transgressions of fair play through literary football fiction. These literary heavyweights from Latin America attempt to demystify the notion of fair play in football by laying bare the mechanisms of foul play and forecasting concerns about inherent venalities produced by increased financial influence over the game in the 1950s and 1960s. By portraying commodification of the professional football spectacle as dangerous to individuals and society, these precursory works mark the beginning of a satirical tradition of denouncing the uglier sides of the beautiful game in football fiction from Latin America.

Very silly party politics: surrealism and satire in the ‘Pythonesque’

2019 sees the 50th anniversary of the iconic British television comedy series Monty Python’s Flying Circus (BBC: 1969–74). This article focuses on the concept of ‘Pythonesque’, placing the broadly political satirical content that is evident within the Pythons’ mainstream TV work and in selected subsequent film work at the centre of the notion of ‘Pythonesque’. It will be suggested, moreover, that the Pythons’ socio-cultural critical position is embedded in a long established British literary satirical tradition. Further, this article will aim to show that ‘Pythonesque’ incongruity, whilst adopting the aesthetic of the nihilistic cabaret of the Dadaists, was further influenced by the contemporary strain of British vernacular surrealism that permeated twentieth century popular performance through Music Hall, Variety comedy and The Goons, and also borrows Surrealist satirical perspectives. This evaluation of ‘Pythonesque’ fusion of satirical and surreal elements will posit that the comedians were simultaneously behind the times; of their time; and, in their prescience, some ways ahead of their time in their construction of humorous commentary on British societal mores and their vividly underscoring of the absurdity of the institutions they targeted.

Gone: Satirical Poems: New & Selected by Stephen Oliver

Reviewed by: Gone: Satirical Poems: New & Selected by Stephen Oliver Stephen Conlon Satirical and elegiac Stephen Oliver. Gone: Satirical Poems: New & Selected. Canberra: Greywacke Press, 2016. Illustrated by Matt Ottley. A$18.95 ISBN 978-0-473-36004-7 My first encounter with Stephen Oliver was to see and hear him reading his poems at the Sandringham Hotel at the then-grungy [End Page 184] lower end of King Street, Newtown in the late 1980s. It was a Saturday afternoon, on a stage usually occupied by bands, and he was in his element as he engaged with the punters, giving as good as he received from them. This was no "Poets in the Park" gig, no audience of "peers" politely responding to one of their own. He, along with Vicki Viidikas, was reading to what most of the then poets around town in Sydney may have disparagingly referred to as swine before which their pearls were not to be spread. They were both relishing the incongruous situation as they were reading their work to a hostile or at least an unappreciative audience. Several decades later, reading Oliver's Gone: Satirical Poems: New & Selected, I realize how grotesque this "half forgotten, half remembered" (to use his image from the title poem of Oliver's combination of some of his old and new voices) past I share with the poet in that hotel may have been. Oliver is willing to immerse himself in the low as well as the high, and fittingly so for a poet with a taste for the grotesque. Satire, at least the kind that Oliver writes, could not be written any other way. There is nothing precious or prissy about the language of the poems. Again, from "Gone": Time accumulates like dust on a mat—old gas works by the tavern block the view,a popular spot for the post-pub screw;but in the end we grew quite sick of that. The images cut in many ways—the highs and lows of cultural cross-currents. Oliver's command of this code-switching technique is one of the secrets to the metamorphic power of these satires to bring the past back to life while also charting the ways that past has passed away. The poet's voice must be big enough to hold all of these times, places, people in it, as it reaches for those shocking cadences that only great art may achieve. Matt Ottley, the Australian award-winning children's book illustrator, adds even more depth to the resonances of orality in the poems with his black-and-white drawings. Ottley's dark visions in Gone give a complementary and sardonic response to many of the pieces. Satire itself may be a dead art, though in the current political climate, the announcement of such a death may be premature. Oliver's poems keep this voice alive, as he dialogues with Larkin, Auden, Byron, and Horace from the distant past and with Baxter and more contemporary poets in the present. The channels are there, in the prosody of the satires: the rollicking rhythms of ballads, the rhyme royal from Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde appropriate for a poem in which his breaks with his own poetic influences are partly embodied in the rhyme scheme's allusion to the originator of that scheme. The notes at the end of the volume in a mock-academic tone demonstrate Oliver's knowledge of the forms he uses. Oliver's voices, as I recall them over the decades, are the same voices heard through a different amplifier in these satirical poems. In Montaigne's words about how he hears his own voice and wants his son's to be "a speech succulent and sinewy, brief and compressed, not so much dainty and well-combed as vehement and brusque," Oliver's tones could come from sixteenth-century provincial France as much as from Wellington, Dunedin, or Sydney. Montaigne would have recognized his voice as kindred. The reader of Oliver's satires needs to be well versed in the traditions of satire, the grotesque, parody, modern, classical, and ancient poetry, as well as the concrete details of the two worlds of New Zealand...

The Refracted Muse: Literature and Optics in Early Modern Spain

The Refracted Muse: Literature and Optics in Early Modern Spain

Fondements socio-politiques et économiques de la tradition satirique

<p>Satire is a literary genre with esthetic value determined by laughter. Every kind of laughter is specific for different periods of economic and social development. The forms of material production underlie the perception of the comic. Satirical traditions are intrinsic to national ideological systems. Satire commits seditious attacks against social ideologies. It influences the politics and the politics influences the satire which is only possible with a certain level of sociopolitical development of a society. Satirical tradition can be formed and established only at conditions of democratic political tradition, otherwise it takes perverted shapes.</p>

Satirical and elegiac

Reviewed by: Gone: Satirical Poems: New & Selected by Stephen Oliver Stephen Conlon Satirical and elegiac Stephen Oliver. Gone: Satirical Poems: New & Selected. Canberra: Greywacke Press, 2016. Illustrated by Matt Ottley. A$18.95 ISBN 978-0-473-36004-7 My first encounter with Stephen Oliver was to see and hear him reading his poems at the Sandringham Hotel at the then-grungy [End Page 184] lower end of King Street, Newtown in the late 1980s. It was a Saturday afternoon, on a stage usually occupied by bands, and he was in his element as he engaged with the punters, giving as good as he received from them. This was no "Poets in the Park" gig, no audience of "peers" politely responding to one of their own. He, along with Vicki Viidikas, was reading to what most of the then poets around town in Sydney may have disparagingly referred to as swine before which their pearls were not to be spread. They were both relishing the incongruous situation as they were reading their work to a hostile or at least an unappreciative audience. Several decades later, reading Oliver's Gone: Satirical Poems: New & Selected, I realize how grotesque this "half forgotten, half remembered" (to use his image from the title poem of Oliver's combination of some of his old and new voices) past I share with the poet in that hotel may have been. Oliver is willing to immerse himself in the low as well as the high, and fittingly so for a poet with a taste for the grotesque. Satire, at least the kind that Oliver writes, could not be written any other way. There is nothing precious or prissy about the language of the poems. Again, from "Gone": Time accumulates like dust on a mat—old gas works by the tavern block the view,a popular spot for the post-pub screw;but in the end we grew quite sick of that. The images cut in many ways—the highs and lows of cultural cross-currents. Oliver's command of this code-switching technique is one of the secrets to the metamorphic power of these satires to bring the past back to life while also charting the ways that past has passed away. The poet's voice must be big enough to hold all of these times, places, people in it, as it reaches for those shocking cadences that only great art may achieve. Matt Ottley, the Australian award-winning children's book illustrator, adds even more depth to the resonances of orality in the poems with his black-and-white drawings. Ottley's dark visions in Gone give a complementary and sardonic response to many of the pieces. Satire itself may be a dead art, though in the current political climate, the announcement of such a death may be premature. Oliver's poems keep this voice alive, as he dialogues with Larkin, Auden, Byron, and Horace from the distant past and with Baxter and more contemporary poets in the present. The channels are there, in the prosody of the satires: the rollicking rhythms of ballads, the rhyme royal from Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde appropriate for a poem in which his breaks with his own poetic influences are partly embodied in the rhyme scheme's allusion to the originator of that scheme. The notes at the end of the volume in a mock-academic tone demonstrate Oliver's knowledge of the forms he uses. Oliver's voices, as I recall them over the decades, are the same voices heard through a different amplifier in these satirical poems. In Montaigne's words about how he hears his own voice and wants his son's to be "a speech succulent and sinewy, brief and compressed, not so much dainty and well-combed as vehement and brusque," Oliver's tones could come from sixteenth-century provincial France as much as from Wellington, Dunedin, or Sydney. Montaigne would have recognized his voice as kindred. The reader of Oliver's satires needs to be well versed in the traditions of satire, the grotesque, parody, modern, classical, and ancient poetry, as well as the concrete details of the two worlds of New Zealand...

Man Is Not a Meat-Eating Animal: Vegetarians and Evolution in Late-Victorian Britain

Man Is Not a Meat-Eating Animal:Vegetarians and Evolution in Late-Victorian Britain Elsa Richardson (bio) Say, puss, was it hard to surrenderThe taste that preferredThe succulent mouse and the tender And delicate bird,The cat's meat seductive and juicy,The casual rat?O grave, philosophical pussy! —"The Vegetarian Cat" Featured in an 1893 edition of the comic newspaper Funny Folks, "The Vegetarian Cat" describes an unusually earnest feline who forgoes meat in favour of "cucumbers and beans." Having managed to resist the temptations of "succulent" mice and "delicate" birds, the cat undergoes a transformation of temperament: usually to be found "yelling at night on the roof," the cat's "riotous tendencies" are quietened by the "mild vegetarian diet" to which it now strictly adheres ("Vegetarian Cat" [Funny Folks]). Victorian readers would have been amused by the notion of a cucumber-eating kitty, but they may also have enjoyed the tale as part of a long-running satire on the absurdities of the vegetarian movement. Whether in the form of fake newspaper reports, bawdy rhymes, or amusing songs, Funny Folks extracted a good deal of comic material from the pious follies and wrong-headed enthusiasms of dietary reformers. The cartoon "Vegetarian Vagaries," serialized through the 1880s, depicted the everyday conundrums of meat-free living: sheep rescued from the abattoir become household pets, a bowl of salad must be avoided because slugs were harmed in its preparation, a pair of non-leather vegetable-derived boots sprout grassy shoots, and an especially dedicated root-eater "evolves" into a turnip.1 Likewise, the story of the vegetarian cat pushed dietary idealism to a farcical extreme to expose the absurdities of human bean-eaters. Yet the case of the meat-avoiding puss speaks of more than a satirical tradition. Though clearly not intended as serious commentary, the strange tale does raise a number of questions—regarding the impact of environment on physiological adaptation, the role of diet in [End Page 117] species development, and the moral capacity of non-human animals—that vegetarians were also keen to address. The fantasy of a predator made mild by a change of regimen can be traced back to humoural theories of balance, which elevated diet as a key determinant of character, but the metamorphosis of the "Vegetarian Cat" was underpinned by more contemporary scientific thinking. By the time of its publication, evolutionary theory had emerged as the dominant paradigm for interpreting the natural world, and the rhyme is grounded in the language of race and adaptation. For their part, vegetarians made key contributions to the public conversation provoked by the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, in 1859. Recognizing its potential to reorient relations between humans and animals, some advocates took up the language of common origins to bolster the meat-free cause, while others offered less carnivorous readings of natural selection. These vegetarian interpretations were not formulated through discussion with evolutionary biologists: when asked for his views on the vegetable diet by the German economist Karl Hochberg, Darwin admitted that he had not given the subject "special thought," and generally it received little attention from the scientific establishment ("Reply to a Vegetarian"). Among a more general readership, however, the topic of meat-eating and its relation to evolution recurred as a point of fierce contention: did proof of common ancestry broaden the scope of cannibalism? Would the insights of comparative anatomy reveal humans to be omnivores or fruitarians? Especially pressing was the question of human-animal kinship—what the renegotiation of this relationship might mean for dining practices but also how it might shift conceptions of subjectivity and responsibility. The imaginary of the natural was essential to the vegetarian movement, but the absorption of animals—especially those of a carnivorous persuasion—into its philosophy was not always straightforward, and some vegetarians struggled to reconcile instinctual rapacity with bestial innocence. More troubling still were the implications of the survival of the fittest, a doctrine that threatened to embed meat-eating as a part of a ruthless natural order. In response, vegetarians were among the most vocal proponents of alternative readings of natural selection that emphasized the importance of...

Graphic Satire in the Soviet Union: Krokodil's Political Cartoons by John Etty

Reviewed by: Graphic Satire in the Soviet Union: Krokodil's Political Cartoons by John Etty Bianca Rowlett (bio) John Etty, Graphic Satire in the Soviet Union: Krokodil's Political Cartoons. University of Mississippi Press, 2019. 223 pp, $30. In Graphic Satire in the Soviet Union, Etty takes on the ambitious task of writing the first book-length study of Krokodil, a popular satirical magazine produced within the Soviet Union and Russia (1922–2000; 2005–2008). Etty's focus on the 396 issues published between January 1954 and December 1964 provides a fresh perspective and important contribution to Russian historiography of this pivotal, transitional time in Soviet history, marked by the death of Stalin, the rise of new leadership under Khrushchev, the relaxation of censorship, and the expansion and normalization of Cold War geopolitics. Throughout the book, Etty rejects Western, structuralist approaches to the study of Soviet media that portray the magazine as simply an ideological propaganda tool operated by [End Page 345] the Soviet state. By utilizing a revisionist approach and a poststructuralist analysis of the graphic content of the magazine, Etty argues that Soviet satire was more complex, diverse, and critical than the traditional propaganda paradigm allows (211). Etty begins familiarizing the reader with Krokodil by providing a brief history of the magazine, its production, and its purpose, discussing the relevant historiography, and outlining the scope of his book. In the first three chapters, Etty examines the conceptual, visual, and satirical dimensions of Krokodil and argues for a revisionist view of the magazine that extends beyond politics. In chapter one, Etty critiques the traditional, structuralist approach towards the study of Soviet media and propaganda due to its overemphasis on state ownership and control over the media and its subsequent characterization of all Soviet media as uniform, ideological propaganda. Etty argues that such an approach ignores the impact and effect of Krokodil on the Soviet population, fails to explain the magazine's popularity among Soviet citizens, and ignores the use of humor and satire in Soviet media (21). Chapter two explores the format and visual language of Krokodil. Etty outlines the historical and contemporary influences on the magazine including Russian Orthodox Iconography, Lubok prints, satirical magazines published in Russia during the 1905 Revolution, contemporary satirical publications in Europe and the United States, and the political theatrical performance and caricature characteristic of Russian political culture in the 1920s. Etty again challenges the propaganda paradigm by claiming that Krokodil was not focused primarily on state issues and foreign affairs, citing as evidence the fact that nearly half of the magazine's content came from readers or amateur contributors reporting on local conditions and issues (54). In chapter three, Etty explores the carnivalesque humor of the magazine, describing it as a seriocomic satirical text that was part of the Menippean satirical tradition (76). He examines Soviet space cartoons, satirical graphics regarding technological inefficiencies and inept bureaucrats, and the use of the 'trickster', the Red Crocodile character that served as both an avatar of the magazine and as a character engaging in acts of retribution against the magazine's targets, and concludes that rather than supporting a state ideology, these satirical images could serve as a means of criticizing the Soviet system and its own inadequacies (83). Chapters four and five focus on the relationship between Krokodil and the Soviet government, along with the transmedia influence of the magazine. Etty acknowledges that Krokodil was part of the Pravda Publishing House which was under the control of the Department of Propaganda and Agitation; nonetheless, he argues that editors had a greater degree of creative autonomy than one might expect. He notes that Krokodil was mentioned in only four decrees coming from the Communist Party Central Committee, two of which encouraged the use of different genres of graphics and called for greater contributions from amateurs and the general public (112). According to Etty, direct political intervention from the state or its censors was infrequent. Moreover, the state welcomed democratic participation from Soviet citizens in the form of letters to the editors, amateur cartoon submissions, and submissions to the magazine's national art, poetry, and prose competitions. Thus, the magazine was distributed largely to individual subscribers but...

“Real versus ideal”: <i>Utopia</i> and the Early Modern Satirical Tradition

Building on previous studies of satire in Thomas More’s Utopia, this article aims at situating More’s founding text of utopian literature more firmly in the early modern satirical tradition, a tradition that gradually dissociated itself from its conventional generic definition informed by classical Roman verse satura. Key concerns of the analysis touch on the pedagogical function, the dialogic engagement with the reader, and the social reforming spirit that transform satire into a mode and help it incorporate the utopian mindset into its characteristic juxtaposition of blame (of a heavily flawed reality) and praise (of a desirable ideal state of existence). More’s masterpiece is essential in illustrating and promoting this development of early modern satire, as references to an immediate predecessor—the Ship of Fools corpus—as well as a famous successor—François Rabelais—demonstrate.
 À partir d’études de la satire dans l’Utopie de More, cet article cherche à ancrer plus solidement ce texte utopique dans la tradition satirique de la première modernité, tradition qui s’est graduellement dissociée de la définition générale du genre satirique basée sur la satire classique romaine. Les points principaux de l’analyse mettent en lumière la fonction pédagogique, l’engagement dialogique avec le lecteur et l’esprit de réforme sociale, qui transforment la satire en y intégrant la pensée utopique en tant que façon d’exprimer le blâme (d’une réalité sérieusement déficiente) et la louange (d’un mode hautement souhaitable d’exister). Le chef-d’oeuvre de More occupe une place centrale dans ce développement de la satire des débuts de la modernité, lorsqu’il est situé dans les contextes qui le précèdent immédiatement — le corpus de la Nef des fous —, et le suivent glorieusement — l’oeuvre de François Rabelais.

Televisual Satire in the Age of Glocalization

This article analyses the highly popular Dutch satirical TV-show Zondag met Lubach (ZML) from the perspective of ‘glocalization.’ This places the show both within the global tradition of late-night satire, originating in the United States, and in the local Dutch tradition of satirical TV. A general overview of these traditions is followed by a close reading of one ZML segment, which is then compared to the American show Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. This comparison reveals the dominant influence of the American tradition of performing televisual satire, thus contesting the common assumption in television studies that nationhood still plays a central role in the practice of broadcasting.

''The Old Tune'': Samuel Beckett’s Poetics of the Author Translation (on the Example of Adaptation of a Play for Radio ''La Manivelle'' by Robert Pinget)

The article examines peculiarities of the author translation and adaptation within the frames of tradition and studies possibilities of the Irish idiomaticity in the context of Beckettian poetics offering an alternative perspective at his own dramaturgy. The article correlates textual and contextual features of a play for radio as genre, showing development of the Irish dramatic tradition from the point of view of Modernist parody and Postmodernist pastiche to study tragicomedy as a leading type of play in the Irish theatre of the 20 th century. Based on Robert Pinget’s ''la Manivelle'' play the article exemplifies peculiarities of the literary, for word, translation as a means of authorial self-discipline intrinsic to Beckettian poetics. The article examines also a concept of an ''Irish bull'' as a statement containing an incongruity or a logical absurdity, usually unknown to the speaker; a ludicrously illogical statement that functions effectively in post-Modernist drama, Irish in particular due to its natural satirical tradition evolved into the XXth c. existentialist mindset to transform into being ludicrous by its absurd logic. Supposedly the Irish are predisposed to this type of absurdity or rather this is a style of humour peculiar to the Irish. Some aspects of the study highlight metaphorical connotations of certain lexical misconceptions, the so-called unnatural conceits that are used erroneously from a logical point of view, but their figurative segment is efficient: catachresis an incorrect use of a word by misapplication of terminology or by strained or mixed metaphor. Such trope is used to trespass the contextual determiners to justify its use. The play follows in the tradition of mystification and travesty, ambivalent nature of 'paddywhackery' as a controversial slang for non-conformity and novelty. The art of auto-(authorial) translation reveals effectiveness of ambivalent obscurity and satire via oxymoron patterns as a marker of stereotypical associations with certain marginalized layers of society Beckettian characters are conventionally being identified with.

Dissenting Voices?

The installation of the Franco dictatorship sparked an inadvertent boom in the production of comics. While many cartoonists hailing from Barcelona’s rich satirical tradition went into exile or clandestine publication, still more turned to the children’s comics market that had become firmly rooted in the Catalan capital since the 1920s. Until the 1950s, comics remained relatively free from censorial intervention, and the development of characters such as La Familia Ulises, Carpanta and Doña Urraca offered cartoonists an outlet for covert critique. However, in 1952, the Junta Asesora de la Prensa Infantil was established to police children’s publications for ‘inappropriate’ content, marking a turning point in the history of Spain’s comics genre. This article discusses the implications of specific legislation for editors, artists and their comic strip characters, focusing on the publications Pulgarcito, TBO and DDT.

Dissenting Voices?

The installation of the Franco dictatorship sparked an inadvertent boom in the production of comics. While many cartoonists hailing from Barcelona’s rich satirical tradition went into exile or clandestine publication, still more turned to the children’s comics market that had become firmly rooted in the Catalan capital since the 1920s. Until the 1950s, comics remained relatively free from censorial intervention, and the development of characters such as La Familia Ulises, Carpanta and Doña Urraca offered cartoonists an outlet for covert critique. However, in 1952, the Junta Asesora de la Prensa Infantil was established to police children’s publications for ‘inappropriate’ content, marking a turning point in the history of Spain’s comics genre. This article discusses the implications of specific legislation for editors, artists and their comic strip characters, focusing on the publications Pulgarcito, TBO and DDT.

Dissenting Voices?

The installation of the Franco dictatorship sparked an inadvertent boom in the production of comics. While many cartoonists hailing from Barcelona’s rich satirical tradition went into exile or clandestine publication, still more turned to the children’s comics market that had become firmly rooted in the Catalan capital since the 1920s. Until the 1950s, comics remained relatively free from censorial intervention, and the development of characters such as La Familia Ulises, Carpanta and Doña Urraca offered cartoonists an outlet for covert critique. However, in 1952, the Junta Asesora de la Prensa Infantil was established to police children’s publications for ‘inappropriate’ content, marking a turning point in the history of Spain’s comics genre. This article discusses the implications of specific legislation for editors, artists and their comic strip characters, focusing on the publications Pulgarcito, TBO and DDT.

Horacio y su historia de la sátira

La historia de la sátira trazada por Horacio en sus Sermones empieza con Lucilio, el inuentor del género, que se inspira en el espíritu satírico de la vieja comedia ática, pero no desarrolla todas sus potencialidades. A este primer tiempo brillante, pero fallido por haberse estancado la sátira en manos de los seguidores de Lucilio que imitaron solo de sus defectos, le sigue un segundo tiempo en el que, tras los intentos frustrados del neotérico «Varrón Atacino y otros» por reencauzar el género, Horacio consigue llevarlo a la perfección que le permite entrar en el canon clásico. De esta forma, Horacio no es el primus en sentido cronológico pero sí en el sentido de excelencia y desde ahí construye la tradición de la sátira de acuerdo con sus propios intereses, pero hay que aceptar que la extraviada evolución postluciliana de la sátira jugó a su favor.

Dos supuestos testimonios del vino de <em>Saguntum</em> en Juvenal y en Frontón

Es muy probable que Iuu. V 24-49 y Fronto 134.23 ss. van den Hout (2ª ed.) no se refieran, como se ha creído, al vino de Saguntum. Juvenal parece referirse a la cerámica saguntina, cuya baja calidad era proverbial en la tradición epigramática y satírica. El pasaje de Frontón sería un ejemplo más de la confusión, en la tradición manuscrita, entre Saguntum y Zacynthos y entre Saguntinus y Zacynthius.

Satura, saturae: itinerários do misto (preceptivas do poema herói-cômico no mundo luso-colonial)

Percurso da tradição do gênero satírico, desde seu surgimento na Grécia antiga até sua prática no universo letrado do século XVIII luso-colonial, objetivando indicar caminhos possíveis para a reconstituição das preceptivas que orientaram especialmente o poema herói-cômico, subgênero satírico com expressiva produção em Portugal e na América portuguesa.

Dubravka Ugrešić and Contemporary European Literature: Along a Path to Transnational Literature

WORLDLIT.ORG 61 I n 1997 I was offered a job to teach English to adults in Croatia. Of course I had been following the events that had torn Yugoslavia apart between 1991 and 1995; and just as I was learning what I could about the newly independent country of Croatia, Dubravka had already left it behind, in 1993, to go into exile first in Berlin and then Amsterdam . The irony is that I ordered two of Dubravka’s early books, to learn more about a country that, in fact, no longer existed, and where she no longer lived nor could feel at home. But these two books were a good introduction nevertheless: Steffie Speck in the Jaws of Life and Fording the Stream of Consciousness are both works of fiction and belong to a tradition of playful satire and black humor that was prevalent all through Eastern Europe during the communist era. As a student of Russian I had read both the classics and the Soviet-era satirical work that followed, so there was something that felt wonderfully familiar about her fiction and new at the same time. Were it not for the accident of history, so to speak, Dubravka might have gone on writing novels in this satirical vein, poking fun at her fellow writers, or lovesick women, or life in the little republic of Croatia when it was part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. It is significant that the breakup of the country drove her into exile only four years after the fall of the Berlin Wall; it is also significant that the once-“dissident” writers of the Soviet cover feature Dubravka Ugrešić and Contemporary European Literature Along a Path to Transnational Literature by Alison Anderson 62 WLT JANUARY–FEBRUARY 2017 bloc suddenly found themselves in a literary context that was utterly changed—they had freedom of expression at last, yes, but not necessarily the freedom to publish or be read; market forces suddenly determined everything that was published throughout the former Eastern bloc. The breakup of Yugoslavia meant not only the transition to a capitalist culture but also a severing of ties among the former republics that at times bordered on the absurd, as new dictionaries were created for each republic’s “language”—no longer known as Serbo-Croatian but as Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (and sometimes Montenegrin). Now Dubravka found herself living in Western Europe but writing in Croatian, living in, as she calls it, a literary out-of-nation zone. Who would read her? Who was her audience? Whom was she writing for? Back then, perhaps only a few dissenting Croats or fellow exiles, unhappy with the nationalistic regime of the 1990s; her Yugoslav audience had virtually vanished. Would the Germans, the Dutch read her in translation? Could she find a place as a European writer ? These were some of the questions I asked myself as I began to learn both about Dubravka’s biography and about life in Croatia in the late 1990s. After the year I spent in Zagreb, I returned to the US and was heartened to see that Dubravka’s books were appearing regularly in English: Have a Nice Day, The Culture of Lies, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender , Thank You for Not Reading, Ministry of Pain, Nobody’s Home, etc. I realized too that she had found a new voice—the voice of exile, one might call it—and that the bubbly, sardonic novels of her youth had given way, for the most part, to incisive, often heartfelt and angry, but always ironic and cautionary essays about life in post-Yugoslavia, in Europe, and in the wider world. Her works appeared not only in English but in many countries, in translation, and she has, so fortunately for us, found her place, at latest count, in twenty-seven languages. I would like to focus briefly on her novel from 1997, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, because it is the pivotal work written from her first exile in Berlin, and it is also a work that echoes and reflects the events of the late 1980s and ’90s in Europe. Before 1989 Berlin was a divided city, the very heart...