Download or read book The Enduring Legacy of Old Southwest Humor written by Edward Piacentino and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2006-02-01 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Old Southwest flourished between 1830 and 1860, but its brand of humor lives on in the writings of Mark Twain, the novels of William Faulkner, the television series The Beverly Hillbillies, the material of comedian Jeff Foxworthy, and even cyberspace, where nonsoutherners can come up to speed on subjects like hickphonics. The first book on its subject, The Enduring Legacy of Old Southwest Humor engages topics ranging from folklore to feminism to the Internet as it pays tribute to a distinctly American comic style that has continued to reinvent itself. The book begins by examining frontier southern humor as manifested in works of Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Woody Guthrie, Harry Crews, William Price Fox, Fred Chappell, Barry Hannah, Cormac McCarthy, and African American writers Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker, Ishmael Reed, and Yusef Komunyakaa. It then explores southwestern humor’s legacy in popular culture—including comic strips, comedians, and sitcoms—and on the Internet. Many of the trademark themes of modern and contemporary southern wit appeared in stories that circulated in the antebellum Southwest. Often taking the form of tall tales, those stories have served and continue to serve as rich, reusable material for southern writers and entertainers in the twentieth century and beyond. The Enduring Legacy of Old Southwest Humor is an innovative collaboration that delves into jokes about hunting, drinking, boasting, and gambling as it studies, among other things, the styles of comedians Andy Griffith, Dave Gardner, and Justin Wilson. It gives splendid demonstration that through the centuries southern humor has continued to be a powerful tool for disarming hypocrites and opening up sensitive issues for discussion.

Download or read book Cajun Literature and Cajun Collective Memory written by Mathilde Köstler and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-12-19 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How does Cajun literature, emerging in the 1980s, represent the dynamic processes of remembering in Cajun culture? Known for its hybrid constitution and deeply ingrained oral traditions, Cajun culture provides an ideal testing ground for investigating the collective memory of a group. In particular, francophone and anglophone Cajun texts by such writers as Jean Arceneaux, Tim Gautreaux, Jeanne Castille, Zachary Richard, Ron Thibodeaux, Darrell Bourque, and Kirby Jambon reveal not only a shift from an oral to a written tradition. They also show hybrid perspectives on the Cajun collective memory. Based on recurring references to place, the texts also reflect on the (Acadian) past and reveal the innate ability of the Cajuns to adapt through repeated intertextual references. The Cajun collective memory is thus defined by a transnational outlook, a transversality cutting across various ethnic heritages to establish and legitimize a collective identity both amid the linguistic and cultural diversity in Louisiana, and in the face of American mainstream culture. Cajun Literature and Cajun Collective Memory represents the first analysis of the mnemonic strategies Cajun writers use to explore and sustain the Cajun identity and collective memory.

Download or read book Cajun Country written by Barry Jean Ancelet and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2014-05-27 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This insightful book is by far the broadest examination of traditional Cajun culture ever assembled. It goes beyond the stereotypes and surface treatment given to Cajuns by the popular media and examines the great variety of cultural elements alive in Cajun culture today--cooking, music, storytelling, architecture, arts and crafts, and festivals, as well as traditional occupations such as fishing, hunting, and trapping. It not only gives fascinating descriptions of elements in Cajun life that have been woven into the fabric of American history and folklore; it also explains how they came to be. Cajun Country reveals the historical background of the Cajun people, who migrated to Louisiana as exiles from their Canadian homeland, and it shows their folklife as a living and ongoing legacy that enriches America.

Download or read book Cajun and Creole Folktales written by Barry Jean Ancelet and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2015-06-19 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This teeming compendium of tales assembles and classifies the abundant lore and storytelling prevalent in the French culture of southern Louisiana. This is the largest, most diverse, and best annotated collection of French-language tales ever published in the United States. Side by side are dual-language retellings—the Cajun French and its English translation—along with insightful commentaries. This volume reveals the long and lively heritage of the Louisiana folktale among French Creoles and Cajuns and shows how tale-telling in Louisiana through the years has remained vigorous and constantly changing. Some of the best storytellers of the present day are highlighted in biographical sketches and are identified by some of their best tales. Their repertory includes animal stories, magic stories, jokes, tall tales, Pascal (improvised) stories, and legendary tales—all of them colorful examples of Louisiana narrative at its best. Though greatly transformed since the French arrived on southern soil, the French oral tradition is alive and flourishing today. It is even more complex and varied than has been shown in previous studies, for revealed here are African influences as well as others that have been filtered from America's multicultural mainstream.

Download or read book Aham Gonna Tell You Again Dat Boudreaux Ain t Me It Ma Cousin written by Larry Boudreaux and published by . This book was released on 2000-11 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Louisiana Creole and Cajun Cultures in Perspective written by Tracy Kathleen and published by Mitchell Lane Publishers, Inc.. This book was released on 2014-06-10 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Louisiana Creole and Cajun Cultures in Perspective is an in-depth look at the different regional cultures of Louisiana that have developed, with an emphasis on current culture. The young reader is presented with an overview of a variety of regional cultures that developed historically and analyzes how the cultural history shapes Louisiana's current cultures. The book is written in a lively and interesting style and contains the Louisiana region's languages, foods, music/dance, art/literature, religions, holidays, lifestyle, and most importantly contemporary culture in the area today. The book has been developed to address many of the Common Core specific goals, higher level thinking skills, and progressive learning strategies from informational texts for middle grade and junior high level students.

Download or read book The Cajuns written by Shane K. Bernard and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2009-09-28 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The past sixty years have shaped and reshaped the group of French-speaking Louisiana people known as the Cajuns. During this period, they have become much like other Americans and yet have remained strikingly distinct. The Cajuns: Americanization of a People explores these six decades and analyzes the forces that had an impact on Louisiana's Acadiana. In the 1940s, when America entered World War II, so too did the isolated Cajuns. Cajun soldiers fought alongside troops from Brooklyn and Berkeley and absorbed aspects of new cultures. In the 1950s as rock 'n' roll and television crackled across Louisiana airwaves, Cajun music makers responded with their own distinct versions. In the 1960s, empowerment and liberation movements turned the South upside down. During the 1980s, as things Cajun became an absorbing national fad, “Cajun” became a kind of brand identity used for selling everything from swamp tours to boxed rice dinners. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the advent of a new information age launched “Cyber-Cajuns” onto a worldwide web. All these forces have pushed and pulled at the fabric of Cajun life but have not destroyed it. A Cajun himself, the author of this book has an intense personal fascination in his people. By linking seemingly local events in the Cajuns' once isolated south Louisiana homeland to national and even global events, Bernard demonstrates that by the middle of the twentieth century the Cajuns for the first time in their ethnic story were engulfed in the currents of mainstream American life and yet continued to make outstandingly distinct contributions.

Download or read book Becoming Cajun Becoming American written by Maria Hebert-Leiter and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2009-06-15 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Becoming Cajun, Becoming American, presents an excellent and unique introduction to American Acadian and Cajun literature, exploring how American writers have portrayed Acadian culture over the past 150 years. Beginning with Henry Wadsworth Longfellows poem Evangeline and the writings of George Washington Cable, Hebert-Leiter examination includes the fiction of Kate Chopin and Ernest Gaines, James Lee Burkes Dave Robicheaux detective novels, and additional writings by Ada Jack Carver, Elma Godchaux, Shirley Ann Grau, and others. Representations of the Acadian in literature reflect the Acadians path towards assimilation. Combining her study of Acadian literary history with an examination of Acadian ethnic history, the author offers insight into the Americanization process experienced by the Acadians, who came to be known as Cajuns during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Download or read book Mardi Gras Gumbo and Zydeco written by Marcia G. Gaudet and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2011 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Writer's Craft. James C. McDonald, a professor of English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, is the editor of The Allyn and Bacon Sourcebook for College Writing Teachers.

Download or read book Louisiana written by Richard Bizier and published by Pelican Publishing. This book was released on 1998-02-28 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Louisiana presents an overview of the culture in the New World and Louisiana, including related literature, such as Longfellow's Evangeline. For the visitor, the state is divided into geographic regions such as New Orleans, the plantations, and Lafayette. For each area, tours, historic sites, and restaurants are described. The section on New Orleans celebrates the French Quarter and the local food and music. Outside of New Orleans are majestic plantations and beautiful bayous filled with cypress trees and hanging Spanish moss. Side trips from New Orleans allow visitors to sample some of the various musical tastes of the Bayou State. Zydeco music may be found in Lafayette, while Cajun music may be heard throughout the southern part of the state. Special features include information on consulates, tourist offices, banks and currency exchanges, and maps which, among other things, show distances between cities. With Louisiana , anyone can pass a good time and learn how to let the good times roll, or, as the Cajuns say rouler.

Download or read book Louisiana Culture from the Colonial Era to Katrina written by John Wharton Lowe and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2008-12-15 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson acquired 828,000 square miles of French territory in what became known as the Louisiana Purchase. Although today Louisiana makes up only a small portion of this immense territory, this exceptional state embraces a larger-than-life history and a cultural blend unlike any other in the nation. Louisiana Culture from the Colonial Era to Katrina, a collection of fourteen essays compiled and edited by John Lowe, captures all of the flavor and richness of the state’s heritage, illuminating how Louisiana, despite its differences from the rest of the United States, is a microcosm of key national concerns—including regionalism, race, politics, immigration, global connections, folklore, musical traditions, ethnicity, and hybridity. Divided into five parts, the volume opens with an examination of Louisiana’s origins, with pieces on Native Americans, French and German explorers, and slavery. Two very different but complementary essays follow with investigations into the ongoing attempts to define Creoles and creolization. No collection on Louisiana would be complete without attention to its remarkable literary traditions, and several contributors offer tantalizing readings of some of the Pelican State’s most distinguished writers—a dazzling array of artists any state would be proud to claim. The volume also includes pieces on a couple of eccentric mythologies distinct to Louisiana and explorations of Louisiana’s unique musical heritage. Throughout, the international slate of contributors explores the idea of place, particularly the concept of Louisiana as the center of the Caribbean wheel, where Cajuns, Creoles, Cubans, Haitians, Jamaicans, and others are part of a New World configuration, connected by their linguistic identity, landscape and climate, religion, and French and Spanish heritage. A poignant conclusion considers the devastating impact of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and what the storms mean for Louisiana’s cultural future. A rich portrait of Louisiana culture, this volume stands as a reminder of why that culture must be preserved.

Download or read book Sweet As Cane Salty As Tears written by Ken Wheaton and published by . This book was released on 2014-07 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fifty-year old Katherine Lafleur is woken from sleep one wintry morning in Brooklyn, New York, by a phone call telling her that her younger sister Karen-Anne has died after being trampled by a run-away rhinoceros. So after years of avoiding her home state of Louisiana, Katherine finds herself journeying back to a place where she's only known as Katie-Lee and she's constantly at odds with her older sister Kendra-Sue. The physical distance may only be 1,500 miles, but the emotional and psychic distances is light years away from her life in New York, where she communicates more with text and social media than through actual conversation. In Louisiana, however, she finds a hurricane of family members. Sisters and brother, their kids and kids' kids. Not to mention the distant relations that threaten to turn the funeral services into a circus of epic hilarity rather than a somber affair. Tensions slowly build throughout the comedy, but only when Katie-Lee spots her high school sweetheart lurking around the outskirts of the graveyard do we finally learn what drove her away from home all those years ago--and just how tight the Lafleur family bond really is.

Download or read book Lemme Tell You a Story written by Allen J. Roy and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2012-10 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Father Roy was born in Hamburg, Louisiana in August, 1929. He is the oldest of four sons and the only one who answered the call to become a Roman Catholic Priest. Father Roy and his family moved a few times and finally settled in New Roads, Louisiana where he attended school and then he entered the Archdiocesan Seminary system. Now retired from active ministry after fifty-eight years, his residence is the St. John Vianney Villa retirement community for priests in Marrero, Louisiana in the Archdiocese of New Orleans. After fifty-eight years of active ministry no one would blame Father Roy for just taking it easy, but that does not seem to be Father Roy's way. He is as active today as when he was pastor of Holy Spirit Catholic Parish. From teaching scripture classes, to ministering to the elderly, to visiting friends and family, to harvesting his little garden, to ... the list goes on and on ... Father Roy is anything but idle. Beginning with a mother tongue of Acadian French, Father Roy encountered and learned various languages in his study, formation, ministry and now retirement. One of those languages was the language of music and its many dialects. His appreciation of those many forms of music and language has been and is a constant presence and enhancement to Father Roy's spirituality and prayer life. God gives everyone an abundance of gifts. It is our job to recognize those gifts and use them for the benefit all of God's people.

Download or read book Understanding Annie Proulx written by Karen Lane Rood and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 624 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this study, independent scholar Rood introduces students and the interested reader to the writings of contemporary American writer Annie Proulx. Coverage includes a discussion of the major themes in Proulx's well-known novels such as Postcards, Accordion Crimes, and The Shipping News as well as three others. Rood also provides background information on Proulx's life and her development as a writer. c. Book News Inc.

Download or read book Language in Louisiana written by Nathalie Dajko and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2019-08-01 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contributions by Lisa Abney, Patricia Anderson, Albert Camp, Katie Carmichael, Christina Schoux Casey, Nathalie Dajko, Jeffery U. Darensbourg, Dorian Dorado, Connie Eble, Daniel W. Hieber, David Kaufman, Geoffrey Kimball, Thomas A. Klingler, Bertney Langley, Linda Langley, Shane Lief, Tamara Lindner, Judith M. Maxwell, Rafael Orozco, Allison Truitt, Shana Walton, and Robin White Louisiana is often presented as a bastion of French culture and language in an otherwise English environment. The continued presence of French in south Louisiana and the struggle against the language's demise have given the state an aura of exoticism and at the same time have strained serious focus on that language. Historically, however, the state has always boasted a multicultural, polyglot population. From the scores of indigenous languages used at the time of European contact to the importation of African and European languages during the colonial period to the modern invasion of English and the arrival of new immigrant populations, Louisiana has had and continues to enjoy a rich linguistic palate. Language in Louisiana: Community and Culture brings together for the first time work by scholars and community activists, all experts on the cutting edge of research. In sixteen chapters, the authors present the state of languages and of linguistic research on topics such as indigenous language documentation and revival; variation in, attitudes toward, and educational opportunities in Louisiana’s French varieties; current research on rural and urban dialects of English, both in south Louisiana and in the long-neglected northern parishes; and the struggles more recent immigrants face to use their heritage languages and deal with language-based regulations in public venues. This volume will be of value to both scholars and general readers interested in a comprehensive view of Louisiana’s linguistic landscape.

Download or read book Good God but You Smart written by Nichole E. Stanford and published by University Press of Colorado. This book was released on 2016-10-14 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking Cajuns as a case study, Good God but You Smart! explores the subtle ways language bias is used in classrooms, within families, and in pop culture references to enforce systemic economic inequality. It is the first book in composition studies to examine comprehensively, and from an insider’s perspective, the cultural and linguistic assimilation of Cajuns in Louisiana. The study investigates the complicated motivations and cultural concessions of upwardly mobile Cajuns who “choose” to self-censor—to speak Standardized English over the Cajun English that carries their cultural identity. Drawing on surveys of English teachers in four Louisiana colleges, previously unpublished archival data, and Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the legitimate language, author Nichole Stanford explores how socioeconomic and political pressures rooted in language prejudice make code switching, or self-censoring in public, seem a responsible decision. Yet teaching students to skirt others’ prejudice toward certain dialects only puts off actually dealing with the prejudice. Focusing on what goes on outside classrooms, Stanford critiques code switching and cautions users of code meshing that pedagogical responses within the educational system are limited by the reproductive function of schools. Each theory section includes parallel memoir sections in the Cajun tradition of storytelling to open an experiential window to the study without technical language. Through its explication of language legitimacy and its grounding in lived experience, Good God but You Smart! is an essential addition to the pedagogical canon of language minority studies like those of Villanueva, Gilyard, Smitherman, and Rose.

Download or read book Cajun Stories My Granpa Tole Me written by Tommy Joe Breaux and published by Pelican Publishing. This book was released on 1999-03-31 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Breaux is a genuine slice of Southern life. Like any good Southerner, he refuses to take himself too seriously. His humor is bound to cure what ails you.” —The Press-Register Filled with stories inspired by the Cajun atmosphere, this volume captures the humorous elements of life and successfully blends them with interesting and animated characters. Tommy Joe Breaux fondly recalls the stories his grandpa told him and wanted a way to share them with others. By writing down these tales, he is saving part of his heritage as well as allowing readers to enjoy some Cajun humor. Returning characters include Elmo and Marie, Poo Poo and Stinky, and greedy Doc Duplichan in this compilation of funny stories. Divided into twelve chapters, each group highlights a different aspect of the Cajun culture and people. Told in Cajun speech, Breaux gives readers a glimpse of the Louisiana countryside while commemorating the stories he gleaned from his grandpa. “Tommy Joe’s funny-bone gumbo won’t give you heartburn—just a big belly laugh.” —Country America “Tommy Joe Breaux’s Cajun humor always makes my day.” —WWL “A warm and witty compilation of down-home stories from a master storyteller at the top of his form.” —Al Tainsky, The MS Beat