Teaching Modern British and American Satire
- Editors: Evan R. Davis, Nicholas D. Nace
- Pages: 384
- Published: 2019
- ISBN: 9781603293792 (Hardcover)
- ISBN: 9781603293808 (Paperback)
“Collectively and implicitly, these essays make a strong case for including the study of satire in a variety of courses and curricula.”
—Brian A. Connery, Oakland University
This volume addresses the teaching of satire written in English over the past three hundred years. For instructors covering current satire, it suggests ways to enrich students’ understanding of voice, irony, and rhetoric and to explore the questions of how to define satire and how to determine what its ultimate aims are. For instructors teaching older satire, it demonstrates ways to help students gain knowledge of historical context, medium, and audience, while addressing more specific literary questions of technique and form. Readers will discover ways to introduce students to authors such as Swift and Twain, to techniques such as parody and verbal irony, and to the difficult subject of satire’s offensiveness and elitism. This volume also helps teachers of a wide variety of courses, from composition to gateway courses and surveys, think about how to use modern satire in conceiving and structuring them.
David Alff
John Clement Ball
Danielle Bobker
Frederic V. Bogel
Kirk Combe
Michael J. Conlon
Amber Day
Helen Deutsch
Darryl Dickson-Carr
Darryl P. Domingo
Joe B. Fulton
Jonathan Greenberg
Matthew Henry
James Horowitz
Nicholas Hudson
Catherine Ingrassia
David Mazella
Sophia A. McClennen
Frank Palmeri
Anne Lake Prescott
Adam Rounce
Robin Runia
Aaron Santesso
Peter Schmidt
Kerry Soper
Anne H. Stevens
Matthew Stratton
Christopher Vilmar
Howard D. Weinbrot
Edward Wesp
Acknowledgments (ix)
Introduction (1)
Part I: Definitions and Techniques
“Open” and “Closed” Satire: Levels of Indeterminacy in Satiric Texts (37)
Parody (44)
Verbal Irony (50)
Teaching Burlesque with Twain (62)
Disgust and Embodiment (71)
Gendered Satires in Dialogue (80)
The Satiric Page (89)
Part II: Genre and Mode
Apocalyptic Satire (103)
Dystopia and the Near Future (112)
Menippos in the Classroom (121)
Satirical Drama in History (132)
Libertine Satire on Stage, Page, and Screen (140)
Part III: Historical, Political, and Cultural Contexts
Satire and Materialism in the Long Eighteenth Century (151)
Satire and Modern Power (162)
Satire on Scholarship in the Eighteenth Century (171)
Form, Norm, and Gender in the 1920s: Dorothy Parker and Anita Loos (181)
Postcolonial Satire (189)
Part IV: Visual Satire
The Eye and the Text (199)
Narrative and Graphic Satire in Nineteenth-Century England (210)
Twentieth-Century Comic Strip Satire (218)
Animated Television Satire (230)
Parodic Television News and Political Engagement (238)
Part V: Satire, Affect, and Student Response
Satire and Offensive Humor (247)
The Millennial Classroom: Satire as Public Pedagogy (257)
Satires of Possessive Individualism (266)
Menippean Satire in the Digital Era: Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story (277)
Satire and Elitism (286)
Interactive Satire: The Reality of Fiction (294)
Part VI: Satire across the Curriculum
Satire in Composition: Writing toward Social Justice (307)
Satire in the Gateway Course (314)
Satire in the Survey (323)
Making Wit, Irony, and Satire the Foundations of American Literature (331)
Part VII: Resources
Resources (343)
Notes on Contributors (363)
Index (368)
