Several passages from Dustin Griffin’s landmark study. . .
“According to consensus, satire is a highly rhetorical and moral art. A work of satire is designed to attack vice or folly. To this end it uses wit or ridicule. Like polemical rhetoric, it seeks to persuade an audience that something or someone is reprehensible or ridiculous; unlike pure rhetoric, it engages in exaggeration and some sort of fiction. But satire does not forsake the “real world” entirely. Its victims come from that world, and it is this fact (together with a darker or sharper tone) that separates satire from pure comedy. Finally, satire usually proceeds by means of clear reference to some moral standards or purposes” (Griffin 1).
Dryden’s Discourse, was “codified into typically Augustan binary formulas: Horace versus Juvenal, comic verus tragic satire, specific versus general satire, raillery versus chastisement, vice versus folly. . . John Dennis is characteristic: ‘Horace argues, insinuates, engages, rallies, smiles, Juvenal exclaims, apostrophizes, exaggerates, lashes, stabs” (Griffin 24).
“As a committed Christian moralist, Erasmus prepares the reader to make choices and to take actions . . . [like More] “a process of educative testing, variously playful or hostile, whereby the moral intelligence of the public was to be trained by being subjected to attempts to undermine or confuse it. . . . Inquiry for its own sake has no value. . . Erasmus seeks not to leave his reader in suspended judgment, in a state of musing doubt and irresolution, but to urge him toward a better choosing” Griffin 56)
The goal of the theorist of satire (as I see it) is not to arrive at elegant and irrefutable definitions of satire as a genre but to enable readers of satire to become more attentive, to enable them to seen an interplay of impulses and effects in a text that—whether written now or five hundred years ago—may or may not have been called “satire” on the title page. . . . Satire is in my view rather an “open” than a “closed” form, both in its formal features (particularly in its reluctance to conclude) and in its more general rhetorical and moral features, in its frequent preference for inquiry, provocation, or playfulness rather than assertion and conclusiveness. (Griffin 186)
Kyle Dickson on Colbert on Campus interview
1:25 am, 09.18.09
Great example. Particularly strong example of distortion in representing social stereotypes.
Kyle Dickson on Television
2:43 pm, 09.11.09
Not sure how I left this out, but we’ll take some time this weekend to discuss gender. . . We can’t go further without Stephen Colbert, Gloria Steinem, and Jane Fonda from his 2006 Saltue to the American Lady:
http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/76495/october-10-2006/jane-fonda-and-gloria-steinem
Kyle Dickson on Class Introductions
12:33 am, 09.09.09
I grew up in Abilene but have escaped periodically for stints in Waco for graduate school, a couple semesters with Study Abroad in Oxford, and most recently teaching summer classes in Malibu whenever possible. It’s amazing what regular trips away do to your enjoyment of West Texas.
Musically, I’m an embarrassment to my wife. My iTunes, as you’ll see, is filled with podcasts and audiobooks. Highlights on my iPod would be Jack Johnson’s Curious George Soundtrack and Flight of the Conchords. My Netflix queue has been rather more ambitious, so we can talk in more detail later.
My first decade at ACU has been a great opportunity to get involved in a dozen different projects, teaching a variety of classes I love. Eighteenth-century British literature is my dissertation area, so satire, drama, and the novel are all areas I enjoy returning to regularly. Last spring I added a Film & Belief class and have been introducing film where possible the last couple years.
Professionally, the last couple years have been focused on planning and developing iPhone tools for the mobile learning program, including spending much of my summer on the new class blog platform. One related project that I’ll be transitioning into this fall is the new Digital Media Center in the Learning Commons I’ll be directing. Several of you have had me for previous classes where you’ve produced media projects, and I’m looking forward to some of the things you’ll come up with this semester.
That’s a start for now. Thanks again to everyone who contributed their own introductions. This is an invaluable head-start to our time together.
Kyle Dickson on Other Links
1:15 pm, 08.27.09
Feel free to leave comments here with reflections about the links above.
You can contribute your own examples in the Satire Sightings assignment.
Kyle Dickson on Other Links
10:34 pm, 09.06.09
The Wittenburg Door has been up and down for much of the last decade, but there have been nice moments. . . Here is one nice update on C.S. Lewis from 2004:
http://archives.wittenburgdoor.com/archives/sataninterview.html
Kyle Dickson on Religious Videos
1:14 pm, 08.27.09
Feel free to leave comments here with reflections about the links above.
You can contribute your own examples in the Satire Sightings assignment.
Kyle Dickson on Web Video
1:14 pm, 08.27.09
Feel free to leave comments here with reflections about the links above.
You can contribute your own examples in the Satire Sightings assignment.
Kyle Dickson on Web Animations
1:14 pm, 08.27.09
Feel free to leave comments here with reflections about the links above.
You can contribute your own examples in the Satire Sightings assignment.
Kyle Dickson on Television
1:14 pm, 08.27.09
Feel free to leave comments here with reflections about the links above.
You can contribute your own examples in the Satire Sightings assignment.
Kyle Dickson on Satire Sightings
10:08 pm, 09.06.09
Not sure that the pessimist blog quite rises to the heights of satire, but it’s a playful start. Another earlier underground blog with more of an alum focus is WeirdACU, also uneven in content but ironic in outlook.
http://weirdacu.wordpress.com/2009/05/17/30th-anniversary-of-willy-wildcat-is-remembered-fondly/