Academic literature on the topic 'Allegorical humor'

This essay attempts to elucidate the structual principles of Irving's "low" humor in the Knickerbocker History of New York by showing that the History is predicated on a schema of human development. In this comprehensive comic allegory the "peopling" of North America suggests the process of human reproduction while the "infant history" of seventeenth-century New York parallels the process of childhood psychological development according to a Freudian psychoanalytic model. As clusters of comic imagery and episode reveal, the reigns of Irving's three Dutch governors-Walter the Doubter, William the Testy, and Peter the Headstrong-embody the oral, anal, and genital (phallic) stages of child development. Similarly, the instinctual orientation of the gubernatorial body is mirrored in the body politic. The reign of Peter Stuyvesant, which occupies the most space in the History, is also notable for a pair of allegorical doublets, Jacobus Von Poffenburgh and Antony Van Corlear, who represent Peter's false and true phallic heroes, respectively. During Peter's reign, an implied contest between these two phallic personages transpires, ending with the English takeover of New Amsterdam.

From the beginning of his literary career, Gabriel Miró (Alicante, 1879 — Madrid, 1930) has been considered a poet in prose, a lyricist or even a stylist. Of course, one cannot ignore that Miró’s work is highly poetic, as for the beauty of his language and landscapes or for some themes easily associated with Romantic lyrical commonplaces. But this is just a superficial screen behind which other narrative qualities are hidden. Indeed, Miró seems to use lyricism to deliberately conceal the narration, somewhat as a form of subliming it. This can be best seen when analysing El humo dormido (1919), for it is one of his books that has most often been praised as lyrical, but, although not exactly a novel, it hides a strong narrative structure of apprenticeship with an allegorical political meaning.

Artiklen ønsker at undersøge, hvorledes kulturelle dynamikker udgør en faktor bag humorens historiske forandringer. Dens ambition er at levere en kulturdiagnostisk undersøgelse af nye populære sensibilitets- og socialitetsformer. Artiklen forsøger at gøre indsigter fra humorens filosofi hos S. Kierkegaard, J. P. Sartre og H. Bergson tilgængelige for sociologien ved at placere dem i en simmelsk kulturteoretisk ramme. Nutidens ironiske sensibilitetsformer forstås derved som en reaktion på det, som G. Simmel benævnte “en vækst i objektiv kultur“. Dernæst skal W. Benjamins allegoribegreb fungere som et værktøj til beskrivelse af nutidens ironiske samværs- og sensibilitetsformer. Artiklens sidste del undersøger sammenhængen mellem ironiske sensibilitetsformer (camp- og retrofænomenet) og disse fænomeners forbindelse til en ironisk fænomenologi; en “tragisk“ opfattelse af kultur.
 
 ENGELSK ABSTRACT:
 Bjørn Schiermer: Irony’s Culture and Culture’s Irony:
 An Investigation of Late Modern Sensibilities 
 
 The article attempts to clarify how cultural institutional dynamics contribute to historical developments in humour. This association is then used as folio for an analysis of contemporary popular forms of sensibility and sociability. The article wishes to contribute to the philosophy of humour and make it accessible for the sociology of culture by placing it in a Simmelian culture theoretical framework; a framework that attempts to understand concurrent ironic forms of humour as a reaction to the growth in, what Simmel termed “objective culture“. These impulses are then unified in W. Benjamin’s concept of the allegoric, which is intended to serve as a conceptual tool in describing contemporary social forms and sensibilities. The last part of the article consists of the unfolding of central phenomenological traits of contemporary popular culture and cultural reception (the camp and retro phenomenon) on the background of a “tragic“ or ironic understanding of culture. 
 
 Key words: Camp, sociology of culture, theory of culture, Simmel.

Based on a presentation delivered at the Parameters of Desire conference in Bielsko-Biala, Poland, June 8-11, 2003, "If Queer Theory Were My Lover” attempts to examine the role of queer theory in the academy using a multi-genre-or trans-genre-format, including personal essay, academic essay, questions, humor, performance, and allegorical fiction. Taking an anti-institutional approach, this work explores how the academy affects the physical bodies of those within it, how we as "queer theorists” position ourselves in relation to our queerness and to theory, and if the goal of queer theory is to be accepted by the academy or to challenge it.

This article unpacks notions of humour, vulgarity, and allegory in social media discourses during the trial of Oscar Pistorius by analysing the dynamic interactions between South Africa’s judicial system and multiple discourses on Facebook and Twitter. It explores whether social media, in this instance, provided a platform for citizen-led conversations on the South African judiciary’s legal processes. It proposes that where the “legacy media” were constrained in facilitating case-related public discussions, social media created an alternative sphere for citizens to engage with the South African justice system throughout the trial. The article examines the popular views that were posted on Facebook and Twitter during the trial. Using a Foucauldian approach and Achille Mbembe’s interpretation of the postcolony, the article argues that the trial of Oscar Pistorius can be used as a lens to examine the humorous, vulgar and allegoric views of South Africans towards the judicial system in the post-apartheid era. This is more so in a context where intersectional contestations of class, race, and gender exist within popular socio-political discourses of “rich white men’s justice” versus “poor black men’s justice.”

Maclear, Kyo. The Good Little Book. Illustrated by Marion Arbona. Tundra Books, 2015.In this work, Maclear uses allegorical techniques to expand on compelling themes. Her protagonist is unnamed; he is “the boy,” every boy who loves to read. The Good Little Book is every book that captivates a reader. Its author is unnamed. Its characters are not delineated. Only a captioned illustration, one of Arbona’s many colorful offerings, provides clues to the book’s plot and impact:“It carried him to the deep sea and steered him towards a faraway land. It dazzled him and stumped him and made him laugh and gasp. He read it through. Then he turned back to the beginning and read it again.”[pp.11-12]Humour is a feature of the work; Maclear likes to play with words--literary words. The Good Little Book resides with others, one of which has won the “Called a Cat” medal. We are informed, however, that “The good little book…had no shiny medals…it didn’t even own a proper jacket.” [p.3]The protagonist’s compulsion to read and reread his good little book introduces the first theme: books transport us to imagined worlds. When the book is lost, then rediscovered, a secondary theme emerges: books are to be shared.Text and illustration lead the reader to surmise that “the boy” is school-aged, a child physically mature enough to walk his dog while riding a skateboard. He is, of course, an avid and independent reader. Tormented by the loss of his book, he is old enough to hunt for it on his own, to scour crowded and heavily trafficked streets, to search the public library. Initially, he appears to have an age appropriate appreciation of the book’s capacity to occupy his mind, to move his thoughts.“The book the boy thought couldn’t do anything did many things.” [p.11] “It did become a loyal companion, there to see him to sleep and distract him when he had to “think things over.””[p.13].To this point, the boy’s relationship with the book seems in keeping with the primary theme: book as intellectual transport. Suddenly, his thought processes revert to those of a much younger child.“The boy worried. How would such a good and quiet book survive? What would it do if it found itself at the edge of the unknown? Or among frightful enemies?...the book did not have skills that would help it in the dangerous wild….”[pp.19-20 ]The story becomes even more anthropomorphic when the book is discovered by various creatures:“A squirrel thought it might be a thriller. A sparrow thought it might be a romance. A raccoon thought it might be a sandwich.” [p.29 ]These developments raise a question: “Who is the intended reader?” A child who has completed grade three would generally have both the ability and the maturity to read the book and to appreciate its messages. This reader might, initially, identify with the protagonist’s dilemma. But would this same youngster identify with thinking that becomes, in the lexicon of child psychologists, animistic? One can readily imagine a nine-year-old reader’s sudden dismissal of the work as, “…a little kid’s book.” One can also imagine that a preschooler would listen with rapt attention to the anthropomorphic sections, but zone out during the development of the book’s themes. Finally, it may be that only librarians, booksellers, and children’s literature specialists would appreciate the humour. In sum, maintaining a clear vision of the intended reader or listener is a requisite in any kind of storytelling; The Good Little Book falls short in this regard.Recommended: 3 out of 4 stars Reviewer: Leslie AitkenLeslie Aitken’s long career in librarianship involved selection of children’s literature for school, public, special, and university collections. She is a former Curriculum Librarian at the University of Alberta.

The Big Pineapple, Big Banana, the Big Potato , Australia positively groans under the weight of big things littered along the highway like jokes awaiting their punch-lines. These commercial road-side enterprises are a constant source of bemusement among Australians and this paper seeks to explore the attraction of the gargantuan and why Australians consider big things to be so funny. Discovering that big things not only give form to national icons but also celebrate the nation's tendency to larrikinism and the associated sardonic, ironic and anti-establishment humour, we are left to consider the role big things may play in the Australian national psyche and how their function as low art turns their collectivity into some strange, impulsive attempt at establishing a system of totems that comes to terms with this big land and its contested ownership. Historically big things like the Colossus of Rhodes, the Pyramids or the Great Wall of China have been physical manifestations of empire and dominion. No laughing matter. But in the United States from the 1920s, particularly in Southern California, we begin to see a profusion of "roadside vernacular architecture" including a big coffee percolator, a big pig, a big corn ear, a big teapot, a big Spanish dancer, a big duck, a big fish and many big hot dogs and big chilli bowls (Heimann and Georges). "Imaginana" is another way to conceptualise these strange forms of cultural production that replicate familiar, safe everyday items (Amdur 12). Early big things, particularly in the United States, had a clearly pragmatic function: to lure car-bound consumers off the highways and into local commercial enterprises with simple, one-to-one signification bringing function to form and high art to low purposes (Gebhard 14). The aim of these big things was to shock, startle and amuse the passing motorist and they took on a humourous edge due to the incongruity of scale and the surreal surprise of reality warping out of all proportion. While big things have a commercial purpose they achieve that purpose because they can be read playfully, always reminding us of the paradox they entail: they act dualistically as both the media and the message, both the referent and the real (Barcan 38). Reading big things as jokes in Freudian terms, we see how they may be eruptions of the unconscious into the mundane (Krahn 158). The first big thing in Australia was the Big Banana, built in Coffs Harbour by an American entomologist, John Landi (Negus). From that time on Australia has had a quirky relationship with big things. The banana is innately funny. The bent phallus, the unique shape, the skin as the standard slapstick cue to pratfall; everything about the banana is an invitation to laugh. Soon the banana was emulated by other funny produce such as the pineapple, the prawn and the lobster and within a decade monstrous agricultural products proliferated beside Australian highways regardless of their innate humour. They were joined by a variety of iconic figures, usually with an obvious connection such as the Big Penguin at the town of Penguin. Big things reinforce notions of national and regional identity: on the national level Australia is portrayed as a land of plenty, a fact emphasized by the sheer vastness of these creations; regionally, these totems function as identity markers and place makers (Barcan 31). Many big things were constructed by migrants and thus can be interpreted as optimistic acts of home making in the vast emptiness of the continent (Barcan 36). There is concern that big things obscure, or even obliterate, the history of regions and the whole continent: the incarcerations, land-grabbing, labour conflicts, corruption and failure. Instead it could be argued that big thing function to both signpost white history and subvert it at the same time: the Big Ned Kelly calling for revolution, the big goldminer looking ever expectant and ever disappointed, the Big Captain Cook in Cairns giving what appears to be a Nazi salute, all point to a larrikin refusal to take the brief and minor white history too seriously. The Australian larrikin sense of humour is mischievous, depreciatory and anti-authoritarian. This sense of humour arises from certain characteristics of the Australian "legend" identified by Ward such as scepticism, egalitarianism and derision towards affectation that are evident in larrikins' confrontations with authority, elaborate practical jokes on each other and the community at large and a "propensity for vulgarising the arts" (Reekie 97). This larrikinism is evident in the way dangerous nuisances (the big crocodile, the big red back spider) and mundane objects (the big jam tin, the big stubby holder, the big mower) are given the same treatment as national icons. There is also the variability of effort and attention to detail, where Aussie "ingenuity" and bush carpentry have been used to turn a good idea into reality in the shortest possible time to produce a very impressionist big koala or just the blob of concrete that is the big strawberry. Ignatius Jones explains: "get your local surfboard maker to cast you a giant prawn in fibreglass and you end up with the cicada that ate Yamba" (Negus). The early documentation of Australian big things was also carried out in a larrikin spirit (Amdur) including the claim that big things are part of an alien conspiracy to make us feel small (Stockwell). Every big thing requires a visionary, a postmodern artist with the passion and the obsession to realise their vision. It is a form of low art, a form of trash culture. But to many who do not frequent galleries and museums, low art is their available form of art and thus becomes their actual art. City planners and the upper middle class tend to denigrate these structures so at odds with their images of beautiful cities, so blatantly bastions of commercialism and so big that they run the risk of obscuring and obliterating real art (Gerbhard 25). Big things are criticised as ugly, kitsch, tacky and giving a wrong impression of a town. There are further concerns that big things allow the tourist to learn without knowing by presenting only one side of the story (Cross 51) and that they make observers minuscule in their presence, dominating the landscape and the attention of tourists (Krahn 165). But looking beyond the aesthetics of the individual instance it becomes apparent that big things also function as a network (Barcan 32), inviting the tourist along the highway of "the arrested fairground (in the) oxymoron of movement" (Krahn 157), offering the hyperreal adventure of collecting the experience, and small mementos, of more big things (Eco 1986). Big things are carnival, inverting social rules, promising some weird utopia (Krahn 171). As a collectivity, the larger psycho-political and metaphysical roles of big things become apparent. For Australia, the crucial question big things raise is the nature of our relationship with the land. Most of white Australia, huddled in cities on the seaboard, has a fear of the empty space at the heart of the continent. Big things are an attempt to assert that the settlers can match the dimensions of the land as, community by community, we write ourselves upon the land. The problem that big things highlight rather than obscure, the problem that can never be sublimated, that constantly erupts from the collective unconscious is that the ownership of the land remains contested, sometimes in the courts, sometimes in the streets, but most importantly in the hearts and dreams of the whole Australian people. All this land once had its own indigenous stories and big things may be seen as a pathetic attempt to replace, re-define and retell those stories by the interlopers now living on the land. "...Big things work allegorically, effacing, most notably, Aboriginal definitions of regional, tribal, spiritual, linguistic or other space" (Barcan 37). There is a sense in which big things are white trash barely obscuring black deaths (Nyoongah 12-14). But like a student's job-work over an old master's self portrait, big things invite us to peek through to the real totems of this land, totems enshrined in the creation myths of the indigenous dreaming. This is big things' contribution to the reconciliation process, to remind us of the fragile hold of white Australia on the land and to demand respect for the stories big things seek to displace. And that is the real big thing for white Australia in the reconciliation process, to accept these stories as our own so the land owns us. This is a much bigger leap than just saying sorry but in some strange way it has already commenced in the massive, mega-fauna that even now are rising from the land like the harbingers of a new dreamtime. A number of authors complain that, intentionally or otherwise, big things exclude indigenous flora and fauna and suggest that this points to a denial of history (Amdur 13, Barcan 36). But in recent years there has been a flood of big indigenous icons, many owned by indigenous corporations: big koalas, big kangaroos, big crocodiles, big bunyips and big barramundi. There is still the potential for indigenous artists to turn the joke around by creating big ancestral beings including rainbow serpents and the like. As Krahn (163) says: "I fear there must have been a Big Aboriginal Elder somewhere, gazing wistfully from the edge of town. But why a chicken?" Works Cited Amdur, Mark. It Really Is A Big Country . Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1981. Barcan, Ruth. "Big Things: Consumer Totemism and Serial Monumentality." Linq 23.2 (1996): 31-39. Cane Toad Collective. "Big Things." Cane Toad Times 1 1983: 18-23. Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyperreality. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1986. Gebhard, David. "Introduction." California Crazy: Roadside Vernacular Architecture . Eds. Jim Heimann and Rip Georges. San Francisco: Chronicle, 1985. 11-25. Heimann, Jim and Rip Georges. California Crazy: Roadside Vernacular Architecture . San Francisco: Chronicle, 1985. Krahn, Uli "The Arrested Fairground, or, Big Things as Oxymoron of Movement." Antithesis 13 (2002): 157-176. Negus, George, "Big Things", New Dimensions (In Time) . 21 July 2003. 26 September 2003 < http://www.abc.net.au/dimensions/dimensions_in_time/Transcripts/2003_default.htm >. Nyoongah, Janine Little. "'Unsinkable' Big Things: Spectacle, Race, and Class through Elvis, Titanic, O.J. and Sumo." Overland 148 (1997): 12-15. Reekie, Gail. "Nineteenth-Century Urbanization." Australian Studies: A Survey. Ed. James Walter. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1989. Stockwell, Stephen. "Cairns Collossi." Cane Toad Times 2 1984: 21. Ward, Russel. The Australian Legend . Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1989. Links http://members.ozemail.com.au/~arundell/bigthing.htm http://www.alphalink.com.au/~richardb/page4.htm http://www.general.uwa.edu.au/u/rpinna/big/big_things_intro.html http://www.bigthings.com.au/ http://www.alphalink.com.au/~richardb/page4.htm Citation reference for this article MLA Style Stockwell, Stephen & Carlisle, Bethany. "Big Things" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0311/6-stockwell-carlisle-big-things.php>. APA Style Stockwell, S. & Carlisle, B. (2003, Nov 10). Big Things. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6, <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0311/6-stockwell-carlisle-big-things.php>

The presented diploma thesis is dedicated to the Czechoslovak paper money is-sued after 1948 until 1989, which is used as a source of historical memory. On paper money is mainly investigated their thematic content, which passed for their development time significant changes and that reflected important needs of the communist regime. The basic source for research this theme is paper money of defined period with taking into account the pre-war paper money because of their comparison. In addition, consideration is given to archival sources, contemporary posters, films, literature, songs, etc. The main target of this work is to determine how paper money reacted to the change of the political system after 1948 and how it was reflected by the users them-selves. It will also be monitored the rise of Soviet influence, sphere of allegorical humor and reflection of artistic community.

‘… holding her solitary way among a crowd of wild, grotesque companions; the only pure, fresh, youthful object in the throng.’ ‘Little Nell’ cares for her grandfather in the gloomy surroundings of his curiosity shop. Reduced to poverty the pair flee London, pursued by the grotesque and vindictive Quilp. In a bizarre and shifting kaleidoscope of events and characters the story reaches its tragic climax, an ending that famously devastated the novel's earliest readers. Dickens blends naturalistic and allegorical styles to encompass both the actual blight of Victorian industrialization and textual echoes of Bunyan, the Romantic poets, Shakespeare, pantomine and Jacobean tragedy. Contrasting youth and old age, beauty and deformity, innocence and cynicism, The Old Curiosity Shop is a compelling mixture of humour and brooding meance. This edition uses the Clarendon text, the definitive edition of the novels of Charles Dickens, and includes the original illustrations.