Download or read book Satire as the Comic Public Sphere written by James E. Caron and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2021-04-19 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stephen Colbert, Samantha Bee, John Oliver, and Jimmy Kimmel—these comedians are household names whose satirical takes on politics, the news, and current events receive some of the highest ratings on television. In this book, James E. Caron examines these and other satirists through the lenses of humor studies, cultural theory, and rhetorical and social philosophy, arriving at a new definition of the comic art form. Tracing the history of modern satire from its roots in the Enlightenment values of rational debate, evidence, facts, accountability, and transparency, Caron identifies a new genre: “truthiness satire.” He shows how satirists such as Colbert, Bee, Oliver, and Kimmel—along with writers like Charles Pierce and Jack Shafer—rely on shared values and on the postmodern aesthetics of irony and affect to foster engagement within the comic public sphere that satire creates. Using case studies of bits, parodies, and routines, Caron reveals a remarkable process: when evidence-based news reporting collides with a discursive space asserting alternative facts, the satiric laughter that erupts can move the audience toward reflection and possibly even action as the body politic in the public sphere. With rigor, humor, and insight, Caron shows that truthiness satire pushes back against fake news and biased reporting and that the satirist today is at heart a citizen, albeit a seemingly silly one. This book will appeal to anyone interested in and concerned about public discourse in the current era, especially researchers in media studies, communication studies, political science, and literary and cultural studies.
Download or read book Hillbillyland written by Jerry Wayne Williamson and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 1995 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The stereotypical hillbilly figure in popular culture provokes a range of responses, from bemused affection for Ma and Pa Kettle to outright fear of the mountain men in Deliverance. In Hillbillyland, J. W. Williamson investigates why hillbilly images are so pervasive in our culture and what purposes they serve. He has mined more than 800 movies, from early nickelodeon one-reelers to contemporary films such as Thelma and Louise and Raising Arizona, for representations of hillbillies in their recurring roles as symbolic 'cultural others.' Williamson's hillbillies live not only in the hills of the South but anywhere on the rough edge of society. And they are not just men; women can be hillbillies, too. According to Williamson, mainstream America responds to hillbillies because they embody our fears and hopes and a romantic vision of the past. They are clowns, children, free spirits, or wild people through whom we live vicariously while being reassured about our own standing in society.
Download or read book The Tall Tale in American Folklore and Literature written by Carolyn Schmidt Brown and published by Univ. of Tennessee Press. This book was released on 1987 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To Carolyn Brown s mind, the tall tale is not necessarily an account of the adventures of a larger-than-life hero, nor is it just a humorous first-person narrative exaggerated to outlandish proportions. It is as well an interaction between teller and audience a game played at the hazy border between the credible and the incredible, a challenge and an entertainment at the same time. The tall tale is also a social statement that identifies and binds a folk group by flaunting the peculiar knowledge and experiences of group members, and it is a tool for coping with a stressful or even chaotic world, for conquering life s problems by laughing at them.
Download or read book The Human Tradition in Antebellum America written by Michael A. Morrison and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2000 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new book consists of mini-biographies of 15 Americans who lived during the Antebellum period in American history. Part of The Human Tradition in America series, the anthology paints vivid portraits of the lives of lesser-known Americans. Raising new questions from fresh perspectives, this volume contributes to a broader understanding of the dynamic forces that shaped the political, economic, social, and institutional changes that characterized the antebellum period. Moving beyond the older, outdated historical narratives of political institutions and the great men who shaped them, these biographies offer revealing insights on gender roles and relations, working-class experiences, race, and local economic change and its effect on society and politics. The voices of these ordinary individuals-African Americans, women, ethnic groups, and workers-have until recently often been silent in history texts. At the same time, these biographies also reveal the major themes that were part of the history of the early republic and antebellum era, including the politics of the Jacksonian era, the democratization of politics and society, party formation, market revolution, territorial expansion, the removal of Indians from their territory, religious freedom, and slavery. Accessible and fascinating, these biographies present a vivid picture of the richly varied character of American life in the first half of the nine-teenth century. This book is ideal for courses on the Early National period, U.S. history survey, and American social and cultural history.
Download or read book Refocusing Chaplin written by Lawrence Howe and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2013-10-03 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Widely recognized in his character of the Tramp, Charlie Chaplin transcended the role of actor to become screenwriter, director, composer, producer, and finally studio head. The subject of numerous biographical studies, Chaplin has been examined as both myth and man, but these treatments fail to adequately address the often-overlooked complexity of his filmmaking. Refocusing Chaplin: A Screen Icon through Critical Lenses features essays that examine the actor and director through various theoretical perspectives—including Marxism, feminism, gender studies, deconstruction, psychoanalytic criticism, new historicism, performance studies, and cultural criticism. Complementing this range of intellectual inquiry is the wide reach of films discussed, from The Circus (1928), The Gold Rush (1925), and City Lights (1931) to Modern Times (1936), The Great Dictator (1940), Monsieur Verdoux (1947), and Limelight (1952). Shorter films, such as “The Pawnshop” (1916), “The Rink” (1916), and “A Dog’s Life” (1918) are also examined. These essays analyze the tensions between the carefully constructed worlds of Chaplin’s films and their cultural contexts. The varied approaches and range of materials in this volume not only comprehensively assess the screen icon but also foster a conversation that exemplifies the best of intellectual exchange. Refocusing Chaplin provides a unique view into the work of one of cinema’s most important and influential artists.
Download or read book Violence and Culture in the Antebellum South written by Dickson D. Bruce and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2013-08-21 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This provocative book draws from a variety of sources—literature, politics, folklore, social history—to attempt to set Southern beliefs about violence in a cultural context. According to Dickson D. Bruce, the control of violence was a central concern of antebellum Southerners. Using contemporary sources, Bruce describes Southerners’ attitudes as illustrated in their duels, hunting, and the rhetoric of their politicians. He views antebellum Southerners as pessimistic and deeply distrustful of social relationships and demonstrates how this world view impelled their reliance on formal controls to regularize human interaction. The attitudes toward violence of masters, slaves, and “plain-folk”—the three major social groups of the period—are differentiated, and letters and family papers are used to illustrate how Southern child-rearing practices contributed to attitudes toward violence in the region. The final chapter treats Edgar Allan Poe as a writer who epitomized the attitudes of many Southerners before the Civil War.
Download or read book Georgia Scenes Characters Incidents c in the First Half Century of the Republic written by Augustus Baldwin Longstreet and published by . This book was released on 1847 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Reading Billy Budd written by Hershel Parker and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Civil War Humor written by Cameron C. Nickels and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2011-02-03 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Civil War Humor, author Cameron C. Nickels examines the various forms of comedic popular artifacts produced in America from 1861 to 1865, and looks at how wartime humor was created, disseminated, and received by both sides of the conflict. Song lyrics, newspaper columns, sheet music covers, illustrations, political cartoons, fiction, light verse, paper dolls, printed envelopes, and penny dreadfuls—from and for the Union and the Confederacy—are analyzed at length. Nickels argues that the war coincided with the rise of inexpensive mass printing in the United States and thus subsequently with the rise of the country's widely distributed popular culture. As such, the war was as much a “paper war”—involving the use of publications to disseminate propaganda and ideas about the Union and the Confederacy's positions—as one taking place on battlefields. Humor was a key element on both sides in deflating pretensions and establishing political stances (and ways of critiquing them). Civil War Humor explores how the combatants portrayed Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln, life on the home front, battles, and African Americans. Civil War Humor reproduces over sixty illustrations and texts created during the war and provides close readings of these materials. At the same time, it places this corpus of comedy in the context of wartime history, economies, and tactics. This comprehensive overview examines humor's role in shaping and reflecting the cultural imagination of the nation during its most tumultuous period.
Download or read book A History of Appalachia written by Richard B. Drake and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2003-09-01 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richard Drake has skillfully woven together the various strands of the Appalachian experience into a sweeping whole. Touching upon folk traditions, health care, the environment, higher education, the role of blacks and women, and much more, Drake offers a compelling social history of a unique American region. The Appalachian region, extending from Alabama in the South up to the Allegheny highlands of Pennsylvania, has historically been characterized by its largely rural populations, rich natural resources that have fueled industry in other parts of the country, and the strong and wild, undeveloped land. The rugged geography of the region allowed Native American societies, especially the Cherokee, to flourish. Early white settlers tended to favor a self-sufficient approach to farming, contrary to the land grabbing and plantation building going on elsewhere in the South. The growth of a market economy and competition from other agricultural areas of the country sparked an economic decline of the region's rural population at least as early as 1830. The Civil War and the sometimes hostile legislation of Reconstruction made life even more difficult for rural Appalachians. Recent history of the region is marked by the corporate exploitation of resources. Regional oil, gas, and coal had attracted some industry even before the Civil War, but the postwar years saw an immense expansion of American industry, nearly all of which relied heavily on Appalachian fossil fuels, particularly coal. What was initially a boon to the region eventually brought financial disaster to many mountain people as unsafe working conditions and strip mining ravaged the land and its inhabitants. A History of Appalachia also examines pockets of urbanization in Appalachia. Chemical, textile, and other industries have encouraged the development of urban areas. At the same time, radio, television, and the internet provide residents direct links to cultures from all over the world. The author looks at the process of urbanization as it belies commonly held notions about the region's rural character.
Download or read book Big Lonesome written by Joseph Scapellato and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2017-02-28 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An inventive, ranging debut story collection from a writer hailed by Charles Yu as "a stunningly original voice—warm, bleak, dark, ecstatic, full of silences and power and life" Reinventing a great American tradition through an absurdist, discerning eye, Joseph Scapellato uses these twenty-five stories to conjure worlds, themes, and characters who are at once unquestionably familiar and undeniably strange. Big Lonesome navigates through the American West—from the Old West to the modern-day West to the Midwest, from cowboys to mythical creatures to everything in between—exploring place, myth, masculinity, and what it means to be whole or to be broken. Though he works in the tradition of George Saunders and Patrick deWitt—writing subversive, surreal, and affecting stories that unveil the surprising inner lives of ordinary people and the mythic dimensions of our everyday lives—"Scapellato’s Big Lonesome is unlike anything else you’ve ever read" (Robert Boswell).
Download or read book Mark Twain Unsanctified Newspaper Reporter written by James E. Caron and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A fresh perspective on the early years of Samuel Clemens's career as a writer and newspaper reporter. Caron examines Clemens's developing comic voice in his journalism in Nevada and San Francisco, then in the travel letters from Hawaii and letters chronicling his trip from California to New York City"--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book Humor of the Old Southwest written by Hennig Cohen and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 540 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most entertaining genres of American literature is the bold, masculine, wildly exaggerated, and highly imaginative frontier humor of the Old Southwest, produced between 1835 and 1861 in an area that extended from Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia westward to Lousiana, Arkansas, Missouri, and Texas. Hennig Cohen and William B. Dillingham have tapped the wealth of this region to produce a collection that over the last three decades has become the standard anthology of Old Southwestern humor. This new, extensively revised edition includes an expanded introduction, a dozen replacement sections, an updated bibliography, and works by three new writers--Phillip B. January, Matthew C. Field, and John Gorman Barr. Most generously represented are George Washington Harris, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Johnson Jones Hooper, and Thomas Bangs Thorpe. Selections from twenty-five authors are featured along with brief biographical essays that combine historical and political analysis with perceptive literary criticism. These selections document important facets of antebellum American culture and provide the background of the literary achievement of Mark Twain and William Faulkner.
Download or read book The Humor of the Old South written by M. Thomas Inge and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-10-21 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The humor of the Old South—tales, almanac entries, turf reports, historical sketches, gentlemen's essays on outdoor sports, profiles of local characters—flourished between 1830 and 1860. The genre's popularity and influence can be traced in the works of major southern writers such as William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, and Harry Crews, as well as in contemporary popular culture focusing on the rural South. This collection of essays includes some of the past twenty five years' best writing on the subject, as well as ten new works bringing fresh insights and original approaches to the subject. A number of the essays focus on well known humorists such as Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Johnson Jones Hooper, William Tappan Thompson, and George Washington Harris, all of whom have long been recognized as key figures in Southwestern humor. Other chapters examine the origins of this early humor, in particular selected poems of William Henry Timrod and Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," which anticipate the subject matter, character types, structural elements, and motifs that would become part of the Southwestern tradition. Renditions of "Sleepy Hollow" were later echoed in sketches by William Tappan Thompson, Joseph Beckman Cobb, Orlando Benedict Mayer, Francis James Robinson, and William Gilmore Simms. Several essays also explore antebellum southern humor in the context of race and gender. This literary legacy left an indelible mark on the works of later writers such as Mark Twain and William Faulkner, whose works in a comic vein reflect affinities and connections to the rich lode of materials initially popularized by the Southwestern humorists.
Download or read book The Blues Aesthetic and the Making of American Identity in the Literature of the South written by Barbara A. Baker and published by Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers. This book was released on 2003 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining the manner in which the aesthetics related to blues music are manifested in the literature of George Washington Harris, Charles Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston, and Lewis Nordan reveals that African-American experience is diffused throughout Southern literature, from Old Southwest humor to contemporary fiction.
Download or read book Han Ola og han Per written by Peter Julius Rosendahl and published by . This book was released on 1984 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Mark Twain in Context written by John Bird and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-02 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mark Twain In Context provides the fullest introduction in one volume to the multifaceted life and times of one of the most celebrated American writers. It is a collection of short, lively contributions covering a wide range of topics on Twain's life and works. Twain lived during a time of great change, upheaval, progress, and challenge. He rose from obscurity to become what some have called 'the most recognizable person on the planet'. Beyond his contributions to literature, which were hugely important and influential, he was a businessman, an inventor, an advocate for social and political change, and ultimately a cultural icon. Placing his life and work in the context of his age reveals much about both Mark Twain and America in the last half of the nineteenth century, the twentieth century, and the first decades of the twenty-first century.
