The Rhetoric of Humor

The Rhetoric of Humor PDF Author: Kirk Boyle
Publisher: Bedford/St. Martin's
ISBN: 9781319020132
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The Rhetoric of Humor explores questions around the central concept of humor and comedic writing: What takes place when we laugh? When might jokes be inappropriate? What is the role of humor in a democratic society? How does one write an effective comedic argument? Readings by comedians, philosophers, journalists, cartoonists, sociologists, activists and others take up these issues and more. Questions and assignments for each selection provide a range of activities for students, while the website for the Spotlight Series offers comprehensive instructor support with sample syllabi and additional teaching resources. The Bedford Spotlight Reader Series is an exciting line of single-theme readers, each featuring Bedford’s trademark care and quality. An Editorial Board of more than a dozen compositionists at schools focusing on specific themes assists in the development of the series. The readers in the series collect thoughtfully chosen readings sufficient for an entire writing course—about 35 selections—to allow instructors to provide carefully developed, high-quality instruction at an affordable price. Bedford Spotlight Readers are designed to help students make inquiries from multiple perspectives, opening up topics such as monsters, borders, subcultures, happiness, money, food, sustainability, and gender to critical analysis. The readers are flexibly arranged in thematic chapters, each focusing in depth on a different facet of the central topic.

The Rhetoric of Humor

The Rhetoric of Humor PDF Author: Kirk Boyle
Publisher: Bedford/St. Martin's
ISBN: 9781319020132
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Rhetoric of Humor explores questions around the central concept of humor and comedic writing: What takes place when we laugh? When might jokes be inappropriate? What is the role of humor in a democratic society? How does one write an effective comedic argument? Readings by comedians, philosophers, journalists, cartoonists, sociologists, activists and others take up these issues and more. Questions and assignments for each selection provide a range of activities for students, while the website for the Spotlight Series offers comprehensive instructor support with sample syllabi and additional teaching resources. The Bedford Spotlight Reader Series is an exciting line of single-theme readers, each featuring Bedford’s trademark care and quality. An Editorial Board of more than a dozen compositionists at schools focusing on specific themes assists in the development of the series. The readers in the series collect thoughtfully chosen readings sufficient for an entire writing course—about 35 selections—to allow instructors to provide carefully developed, high-quality instruction at an affordable price. Bedford Spotlight Readers are designed to help students make inquiries from multiple perspectives, opening up topics such as monsters, borders, subcultures, happiness, money, food, sustainability, and gender to critical analysis. The readers are flexibly arranged in thematic chapters, each focusing in depth on a different facet of the central topic.

The Rhetoric of Racist Humour

The Rhetoric of Racist Humour PDF Author: Dr Simon Weaver
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 1409494594
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
In today's multicultural and multireligious societies, humour and comedy often become the focus of controversy over alleged racist or offensive content, as shown, for instance, by the intense debate of Sacha Baron Cohen's characters Ali G and Borat, and the Prophet Muhammad cartoons published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. Despite these intense debates, commentary on humour in the academy lacks a clear way of connecting the serious and the humorous, and a clear way of accounting for the serious impact of comic language. The absence of a developed 'serious' vocabulary with which to judge the humorous tends to encourage polarized debates, which fail to account for the paradoxes of humour. This book draws on the social theory of Zygmunt Baumann to examine the linguistic structure of humour, arguing that, as a form of language similar to metaphor, it is both unstable and unpredictable, and structurally prone to act rhetorically; that is, to be convincing. Deconstructing the dominant form of racism aimed at black people in the US, and that aimed at Asians in the UK, The Rhetoric of Racist Humour shows how racist humour expresses and supports racial stereotypes in the US and UK, while also exploring the forms of resistance presented by the humour of Black and Asian comedians to such stereotypes. An engaging exploration of modern, late modern and fluid or postmodern forms of humour, this book will be of interest to sociologists and scholars of cultural and media studies, as well as those working in the fields of race and ethnicity, humour and cultural theory.

Melville and Repose

Melville and Repose PDF Author: John Bryant
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195077822
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
Arguing that Melville saw writing as a series of attempts to reach an unreachable union of word and thought ("voicing the voiceless"), Bryant shows how Melville attempted to place the reader in an equivalent condition of "tense repose." He posits that Melville incorporated laughter into his writing as a means of teasing the reader into deeper thought. To this end, Melville fused a "rhetoric of geniality" and "picturesque sensibility" adopted from the British with a "rhetoric of deceit" borrowed from the American tall tale, thus creating his own amiably cosmopolitan "rhetoric of aesthetic repose.".

Standing Up, Speaking Out

Standing Up, Speaking Out PDF Author: Matthew R. Meier
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317328949
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
In recent decades, some of the most celebrated and culturally influential American oratorical performances have come not from political leaders or religious visionaries, but from stand-up comics. Even though comedy and satire have been addressed by rhetorical scholarship in recent decades, little attention has been paid to stand-up. This collection is an attempt to further cultivate the growing conversation about stand-up comedy from the perspective of the rhetorical tradition. It brings together literatures from rhetorical, cultural, and humor studies to provide a unique exploration of stand-up comedy that both argues on behalf of the form’s capacity for social change and attempts to draw attention to a series of otherwise unrecognized rhetors who have made significant contributions to public culture through comedy.

The Multimodal Rhetoric of Humour in Saudi Media Cartoons

The Multimodal Rhetoric of Humour in Saudi Media Cartoons PDF Author: Wejdan Alsadi
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1501509845
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
Cartoons, as a form of humour and entertainment, are a social product which are revealing of different social and political practices that prevail in a society, humourised and satirised by the cartoonist. This book advances research on cartoons and humour in the Saudi context. It contributes to the growing multimodal research on non-interactional humour in the media that benefits from traditional theories of verbal humour. The study analyses the interaction between visual and verbal modes, highlighting the multimodal manifestations of the rhetorical devices frequently employed to create humour in English-language cartoons collected from the Saudi media. The multimodal analysis shows that the frequent rhetorical devices such as allusions, parody, metaphor, metonymy, juxtaposition, and exaggeration take a form which is woven between the visual and verbal modes, and which makes the production of humorous and satirical effect more unique and interesting. The analysis of the cartoons across various thematic categories further offers a window into contemporary Saudi society.

The Primer of Humor Research

The Primer of Humor Research PDF Author: Victor Raskin
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110198495
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 679

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Book Description
The book is intended to provide a definitive view of the field of humor research for both beginning and established scholars in a variety of fields who are developing an interest in humor and need to familiarize themselves with the available body of knowledge. Each chapter of the book is devoted to an important aspect of humor research or to a disciplinary approach to the field, and each is written by the leading expert or emerging scholar in that area. There are two primary motivations for the book. The positive one is to collect and summarize the impressive body of knowledge accumulated in humor research in and around Humor: The International Journal of Humor Research. The negative motivation is to prevent the embarrassment to and from the "first-timers," often established experts in their own field, who venture into humor research without any notion that there already exists a body of knowledge they need to acquire before publishing anything on the subject-unless they are in the business of reinventing the wheel and have serious doubts about its being round! The organization of the book reflects the main groups of scholars participating in the increasingly popular and high-powered humor research movement throughout the world, an 800 to 1,000-strong contingent, and growing. The chapters are organized along the same lines: History, Research Issues, Main Directions, Current Situation, Possible Future, Bibliography-and use the authors' definitive credentials not to promote an individual view, but rather to give the reader a good comprehensive and condensed view of the area.

The Oxford Handbook of Rhetorical Studies

The Oxford Handbook of Rhetorical Studies PDF Author: Michael John MacDonald
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199731594
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 844

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Book Description
Featuring roughly sixty specially commissioned essays by an international cast of leading rhetoric experts from North America, Europe, and Great Britain, the Handbook will offer readers a comprehensive topical and historical survey of the theory and practice of rhetoric from ancient Greece and Rome through the Middle Ages and Enlightenment up to the present day.

A Decade of Dark Humor

A Decade of Dark Humor PDF Author: Ted Gournelos
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1617030074
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
A Decade of Dark Humor analyzes ways in which popular and visual culture used humor-in a variety of forms-to confront the attacks of September 11, 2001 and, more specifically, the aftermath. This interdisciplinary volume brings together scholars from four countries to discuss the impact of humor and irony on both media discourse and tangible political reality. Furthermore, it demonstrates that laughter is simultaneously an avenue through which social issues are deferred or obfuscated, a way in which neoliberal or neoconservative rhetoric is challenged, and a means of forming alternative political ideologies. The volume's contributors cover a broad range of media productions, including news parodies (The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Colbert Report, The Onion), TV roundtable shows (Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher), comic strips and cartoons (Aaron McGruder's The Boondocks, Jeff Danzinger's editorial cartoons), television drama (Rescue Me), animated satire (South Park), graphic novels (Art Spiegelman's In the Shadow of No Towers), documentary (Fahrenheit 9/11), and other productions. Along with examining the rhetorical methods and aesthetic techniques of these productions, the essays place each in specific political and journalistic contexts, showing how corporations, news outlets, and political institutions responded to-and sometimes co-opted-these forms of humor.

A Rhetoric of Irony

A Rhetoric of Irony PDF Author: Wayne C. Booth
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226065537
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
Perhaps no other critical label has been made to cover more ground than "irony," and in our time irony has come to have so many meanings that by itself it means almost nothing. In this work, Wayne C. Booth cuts through the resulting confusions by analyzing how we manage to share quite specific ironies—and why we often fail when we try to do so. How does a reader or listener recognize the kind of statement which requires him to reject its "clear" and "obvious" meaning? And how does any reader know where to stop, once he has embarked on the hazardous and exhilarating path of rejecting "what the words say" and reconstructing "what the author means"? In the first and longer part of his work, Booth deals with the workings of what he calls "stable irony," irony with a clear rhetorical intent. He then turns to intended instabilities—ironies that resist interpretation and finally lead to the "infinite absolute negativities" that have obsessed criticism since the Romantic period. Professor Booth is always ironically aware that no one can fathom the unfathomable. But by looking closely at unstable ironists like Samuel Becket, he shows that at least some of our commonplaces about meaninglessness require revision. Finally, he explores—with the help of Plato—the wry paradoxes that threaten any uncompromising assertion that all assertion can be undermined by the spirit of irony.

You Talkin' To Me?

You Talkin' To Me? PDF Author: Sam Leith
Publisher: Profile Books
ISBN: 1847654258
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Rhetoric gives our words the power to inspire. But it's not just for politicians: it's all around us, whether you're buttering up a key client or persuading your children to eat their greens. You have been using rhetoric yourself, all your life. After all, you know what a rhetorical question is, don't you? In this updated edition of his classic guide, Sam Leith traces the art of argument from ancient Greece down to its many modern mutations. He introduces verbal villains from Hitler to Donald Trump - and the three musketeers: ethos, pathos and logos. He explains how rhetoric works in speeches from Cicero to Richard Nixon, and pays tribute to the rhetorical brilliance of AC/DC's "Back In Black". Before you know it, you'll be confident in chiasmus and proud of your panegyrics - because rhetoric is useful, relevant and absolutely nothing to be afraid of.